THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT
 
 STUDIES 
 
 CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHY
 
 ^-
 
 STUDIES 
 
 IN 
 
 CONTEMPORARY 
 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 JAMES BRYCE 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 'the holy KOMAN' EMl'IRE.' 'THE AMiCRICAN CO.MM0N'w;;aL rH.' ETC. 
 
 ILontiott 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limifeu 
 
 .Ni:\V YORK : ! Ill-: MAfMU.l.AN COMPANY 
 1904
 
 ! 
 
 Coffyright in the United States of America 1903 
 
 First Edition Afril 1903. Reprinted May 1903 
 Second Edition {>-evised) January 1904
 
 Collepre 
 Libiuiy 
 
 TO 
 
 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT 
 
 pi;ksii)K.\t of harvard univkrsitv 
 
 IN COMMEMORATIOX OF A LONG AND 
 
 VAI.Ul-D FRIKXHSH-P
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The first and the last of these Studies relate to 
 persons whose fame has gone out into all lands, and 
 about whom so much remains to be said that one 
 who has reflected on their careers need not offer 
 an apology for saying something. Of the other 
 eighteen sketches, some deal with eminent men 
 whose names are still familiar, but whose person- 
 alities have begun to fade from the minds of the 
 present generation. The rest treat of persons 
 who came less before the public, but whose 
 brilliant gifts and solid services to the world 
 make them equally deserve to be remembered 
 with honour. Having been privileged to enjoy 
 their friendship, I have felt it a duty to do what 
 a friend can to present a faithful record of their 
 excellence which may help to keep their memory 
 fresh and green. 
 
 These Studies are, however, not to be regarded
 
 viii Biographical Studies 
 
 as biographies, even in miniature. My aim 
 has rather been to analyse the character and 
 powers of each of the persons described, and, 
 as far as possible, to convey the impression 
 which each made in the daily converse of life. 
 All of them, except Lord Beaconsfield, were 
 personally, and most of them intimately, known 
 to me. 
 
 In the six Studies which treat of politicians 
 I have sought to set aside political predilections, 
 and have refrained from expressing political 
 opinions, though it has now and then been 
 necessary to point out instances in which the 
 subsequent course of events has shown Lord 
 Beaconsfield, Mr. Lowe, and Mr. Gladstone to 
 have been right or wrong (as the case may be) 
 in the action they respectively took. 
 
 The sketches of T. H, Green, E. A. Free- 
 man, and J. R. Green were originally written 
 for English magazines, and most of the other 
 Studies have been published in the United 
 States. All of those that had already appeared 
 in print have been enlarged and revised, some 
 indeed virtually rewritten. I have to thank the 
 proprietors of the English Historical Rcvieiu,
 
 Preface 
 
 IX 
 
 the Co7itcvLpora7y Review, and the Neiv York 
 Nation, as also the Century Company of New 
 York, for their permission to use so much of 
 the matter of the volume as had appeared (in 
 its original form) in the organs belonging to 
 them respectively. 
 
 March 6, 1903.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 1. Bkmjamin Disrakli, Earl of 
 
 EkACONS FIELD 
 
 n. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean 
 
 OF West.minsti:r 
 in. Thomas Hill ("iREen . 
 IV. Archh'.ald Campp.ell 'Fait, Arch 
 
 bishop of Canterbury . 
 V. Anthony Trollope . 
 VI. John Richard Green 
 \ii. Sir Ge()R(;e Jessel 
 VIII. Hu(;h ^['CALMON^ Cairns, Eari 
 Cairns .... 
 IX. James Eraser, liisnop of 2\1an 
 
 CHESTER .... 
 X. Stafford Henry Northcote 
 
 Eakl of Iddeslkioh 
 XL Charles Stewart Parneli, 
 XII. Henry Edward ]\L\nnix(;, x\rch 
 
 BISHOP AND Cardinal 
 XIII. Edward Augustus 1'"reeman 
 XFv'. Ror.EkT Lowi;, \'isc:ol'nt Shi:r 
 
 liROOKF. .... 
 
 XV. ^\"II.LIA^i Ror,i;kisoN Smiii: 
 XVI. Henry Sidcwk:; 
 
 XVII. I'.DWAkii ErNI'.ST Ji(iWi;N 
 
 xviii. Edwin Eawri:xci, Codrix . 
 XIX. John ]', m e rich 1) a l f, i : r( ; - Actox 
 
 EORD ACFOX . 
 XX. ^\'ILLIAM I'^WARl ( il.ADSlON i: 
 
 xi 
 
 F 
 
 
 l'A(,K 
 
 . 1S04- 
 
 1881 
 
 I 
 
 1 8 I 5- 
 
 1 88 I 
 
 69 
 
 . 1S36- 
 
 1882 
 
 85 
 
 - 
 
 . iSii- 
 
 1882 
 
 100 
 
 I8I5- 
 
 1882 
 
 I 16 
 
 1837- 
 
 18S3 
 
 131 
 
 . 1S24- 
 
 1883 
 
 170 
 
 . iSiy- 
 
 1885 
 
 1S4 
 
 - 
 
 . 18 18- 
 
 1885 
 
 196 
 
 . I 8 I 8- 
 
 1887 
 
 2 I I 
 
 . 1846- 
 
 I 89 I 
 
 227 
 
 . 1808- 
 
 1892 
 
 -5 
 
 18^3- 
 
 1892 
 
 2b 2 
 
 . 1811- 
 
 1 ;; 9 2 
 
 -93 
 
 . 1846 
 
 1894 
 
 3' 
 
 1838^ 
 
 1 900 
 
 3-7 
 
 83Ci- 
 
 1 90 1 
 
 343 
 
 I S 3 I - 
 
 1 902 
 
 3^K^ 
 
 >834- 
 
 1 9 c 2 
 
 :S2 
 
 1809- 
 
 1898 
 
 400
 
 BENJAMIN DISRAELI, EARL OF 
 BEACONSFIELD^ 
 
 When Lord Beaconsfield died in 1881 we all 
 wondered what people would think of him fifty 
 years thereafter. Divided as our own judgments 
 were, we asked whether he would still seem a 
 problem. Would opposite views regarding his 
 aims, his ideas, the sources of his power, still 
 divide the learned, and perplex the ordinary 
 reader ? Would men complain that history can- 
 not be good for much when, with the abundant 
 materials at her disposal, she had not framed a 
 consistent theory of one who played so great a 
 part in so ample a theatre ? People called him 
 a riddle ; and he certainly affected a sphinx-like 
 attitude. Would the riddle be easier then than 
 it was for us, from among whom the man had 
 even now departed ? 
 
 When he died, there were many in England 
 who revered him as a profound thinker and a 
 lofty character, animated by sincere patriotism. 
 
 ' No "authorised" life of Lord Heaconsfield, nor indeed any life com- 
 mensurale ^vilh the [lart he played in English j;olitics, has yet appeared. 
 
 B
 
 2 Biographical Studies 
 
 Others, probably as numerous, held him for no 
 better than a cynical charlatan, bent through 
 life on his own advancement, who permitted no 
 sense of public duty, and very little human 
 compassion, to stand in the way of his insatiate 
 ambition. The rest did not know what to think. 
 They felt in him the presence of power ; they 
 felt also something repellent. They could not 
 understand how a man who seemed hard and 
 unscrupulous could win so much attachment and 
 command so much obedience. 
 
 Since Disraeli departed nearly one-half of 
 those fifty years has passed away. Few are 
 living who can claim to have been his personal 
 friends, none who were personal enemies. No 
 living statesman professes to be his political 
 disciple. The time has come when one may dis- 
 cuss his character and estimate his career without 
 being suspected of doing so with a party bias 
 or from a party motive. Doubtless those who 
 condemn and those who defend or excuse some 
 momentous parts of his conduct, such as, tor 
 instance, his policy in the East and in Afghan- 
 istan from 1876 to 1879, will differ in their 
 judgment of his wisdom and foresight. If this 
 be a difficulty, it is an unavoidable one, and 
 may never quite disappear. There were in the 
 days of Augustus some who blamed that sagacious 
 ruler for seeking to check the expansion of the 
 Roman Empire. There were in the days of King
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 3 
 
 Henry the Second some who censured and others 
 who praised him for issuing the Constitutions of 
 Clarendon. Both questions still remain open to 
 argument ; and the conclusion any one forms 
 must affect in some measure his judgment of 
 each monarch's statesmanship. So differences of 
 opinion about particular parts of Disraeli's long 
 career need not prevent us from dispassionately 
 inquiring what were the causes that enabled him 
 to attain so striking a success, and w^hat is the 
 place which posterity is likely to assign to him 
 among the rulers of England. 
 
 First, a few words about the salient events of 
 his life, not by way of writing a biography, but 
 to explain what follows. 
 
 He was born in London, in 1804. His father, 
 Isaac Disraeli, was a literary man of cultivated 
 taste and independent means, who wrote a good 
 many books, the best known of which is his 
 Ciiriosities of Literatitre, a rambling work, full 
 of entertaining matter. He belonged to that 
 division of the Jewish race which is called 
 the Sephardim, and traces itself to Spain and 
 Portugal ; ^ but he had ceased to frequent the 
 synagogue had, in fact, broken with his co- 
 religionists. Isaac had access to good society, so 
 that the boy saw eminent and polished men irom 
 his early years, and, before he had reached man- 
 
 ' Disraeli's family claimed lu be of Spanish orii^in, Init ha. I come from 
 Italy to Enj^land shortly before 174S.
 
 4 Biographical Studies 
 
 hood, began to make his way in drawing-rooms 
 where he met the wittiest and best-known people 
 of the day. He was articled to a firm of attor- 
 neys in London In 1821, but after two or three 
 years quitted a sphere for which his peculiar gifts 
 were ill suited/ Samuel Rogers, the poet, took 
 a fancy to him, and had him baptized at the age 
 of thirteen. As he grew up, he was often to be 
 seen with Count d'Orsay and Lady Blessington, 
 well-known figures who fluttered on the confines 
 of fashion and Bohemia. It is worth remarking 
 that he never went either to a public school or to 
 a university. In England it has become the 
 fashion to assume that nearly all the persons who 
 have shone in public life have been educated in one 
 of the great public schools, and that they owe to 
 its training their power of dealing with men and 
 assemblies. Such a superstition is sufficiently 
 refuted by the examples of men like Pitt, 
 Macaulay, Bishop Wilberforce, Disraeli, Cobden, 
 Bright, and Cecil Rhodes, not to add instances 
 drawn from Ireland and Scotland, where till very 
 recently there have been no public schools in the 
 current English sense. 
 
 Disraeli first appeared before the public in 
 1826, when he published Vivian Grey, an amazing 
 
 ' There are few legal allusions in his novels, fewer in priiporiion than 
 in Shakesjieare's plays, hul an ingi'iiious travest)' of the Mni^lish use of 
 legal (lelions maybe f)un<I in the ]'oyai;i: of Captain J\>patiiih!, a satire 
 on the English constitution and government. I'opanilla, who is to he 
 tried for treason, is, to liis astt)ni>hment, indicted for killing a can;clopard.
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 5 
 
 book to be the production of a youth of twenty- 
 two. Other nov^els The Young Duke, Vcnctia, 
 Contarhii Fleming, Henrietta Temple main- 
 tained without greatly increasing his reputa- 
 tion between 1831 and 1837. Then came two 
 poHtical stories, Coningsby and Sybil, in 1844 
 and 1845, followed by Tancred in 1847, and the 
 Life of Lord George Bentinck in 1852 ; with a 
 long interval of silence, till, in 1870, he produced 
 Lothair, in 1880 Endymion. Besides these he 
 published in 1839 the tragedy oi Alar cos, and in 
 1835 the more ambitious Revolutionary Epick, 
 neither of which had much success. In 1828-31 
 he took a journey through the East, visiting 
 Constantinople, Syria, and Egypt, and it was 
 then, no doubt, in lands peculiarly interesting to 
 a man of his race, that he conceived those ideas 
 about the East and its mysterious influences 
 which figure largely in some of his stories, 
 notably in Tancred, and which in 1878 had no 
 small share in shaping his policy and that of 
 England. Meanwhile, he had not forgotten the 
 political aspirations which we see in Vivian Grey. 
 In 1832, just before the passing of the Reform 
 Bill, he appeared as candidate for the petty 
 borough of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, 
 and was defeated by a majority of twenty-three 
 to twelve, so few were the voters in many 
 boroughs of those days. After the Bill had 
 enlarged the constituency, he tried his luck twice
 
 6 Biographical Studies 
 
 again, in 1833 ^"^ 1^35' both times unsuccess- 
 fully, and came before two other boroughs also, 
 Taunton and Marylebone, though in the latter 
 case no contest took place. Such activity in a 
 youth with little backing from friends and com- 
 paratively slender means marked him already as 
 a man of spirit and ambition. His next attempt 
 was more lucky. At the general election of 1837 
 he was returned for Maidstone. 
 
 His political professions during this period 
 have been keenly canvassed ; nor is it easy to 
 form a fair judgment on them. In 1832 he 
 had sought and obtained recommendations from 
 Joseph Hume and Daniel O'Connell, and people 
 had therefore set him down as a Radical. Al- 
 though, however, his professions of political 
 faith included dogmas which, like triennial parlia- 
 ments, the ballot, and the imposition of a new 
 land-tax, were part of the so-called " Radical " 
 platform, still there was a vague and fanciful 
 note in his utterances, and an aversion to the 
 conventional Whig way of putting things, which 
 showed that he was not a thorough -going 
 adherent of any of the then existing political 
 parties, but was trying to strike out a new line 
 and attract men by the promise of something 
 fresher and bolder than the recognised schools 
 offered. In 1834 his hostility to Whiggism 
 was becoming more pronounced, and a tender- 
 ness for some Tory doctrines more discernible.
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 
 
 7 
 
 Finally, in 1835, he appeared as an avowed 
 Tory, accepting the regular creed of the party, 
 and declaring himself a follower of Sir Robert 
 Peel, but still putting forward a number of 
 views peculiar to himself, which he thereafter 
 developed not only in his speeches but in his 
 novels. Conmgsby and Sybil were meant to be 
 a kind of manifesto of the "Young England" 
 party a party which can hardly be said to have 
 existed outside his own mind, thous^h a small knot 
 of aristocratic youths who caught up and repeated 
 his phrases seemed to form a nucleus for it. 
 
 The fair conclusion from his deliverances 
 during these early years is that he w^as at first 
 much more of a Liberal than a Tory, yet with 
 ideas distinctively his own which made him appear 
 in a manner independent of both parties. The 
 old party lines might seem to have been almost 
 effaced by the struggle over the Reform i^ill ; 
 and it was natural for a bold and inventive niind 
 to imagine a new departure, and put forward a 
 programme in which a sort of Radicalism was 
 mingled with doctrines of a difterent t)pe. But 
 when it became clear after a time that the old 
 political divisions still subsisted, and that such a 
 distinctive position as he had conceived could not 
 be maintained, he then, having to choose between 
 one or other of the two recognised parties, chose 
 the Tories, dropping sonie tenets he had previ- 
 ously advocated which were inconsistent with their
 
 8 Biographical Studies 
 
 creed, but retaining much of his peculiar way 
 of looking at political questions. How far the 
 change which passed over him was a natural 
 development, how far due to mere calculations of 
 interest, there is little use discussing : perhaps he 
 did not quite know himself. Looking back, we 
 of to-day might be inclined to think that he re- 
 ceived more blame for it than he deserved, but 
 contemporary observers generally set it down to a 
 want of principle. In one thing, however, he was 
 consistent then, and remained consistent ever after 
 his hearty hatred of the Whigs, There was 
 something in the dryness and coldness of the great 
 Whig families, their stiff constitutionalism, their 
 belief in political economy, perhaps also their 
 occasional toyings with the Nonconformists 
 (always an object of dislike to Disraeli), which 
 roused all the antagonisms of his nature, personal 
 and Oriental. 
 
 When he entered the House of Commons he 
 was already well known to fashionable London, 
 partly by his striking face and his powers of con- 
 versation, partly by the eccentricities of his dress 
 he loved bright-coloured waistcoats, and decked 
 himself with rings, partly by his novels, whose 
 satirical pungency had made a noise in society. 
 He had also become, owing to his apparent change 
 of front, the object of angry criticism. A quarrel 
 with Daniel O'Connell, in the course of which he 
 challenged the great Irishman to fight a duel, each
 
 Lord Beaconsheld 9 
 
 party having described the other with a freedom 
 of language bordering on scurriHty, made him, for 
 a time, the talk of the political world. Thus 
 there was more curiosity evoked by his first 
 speech than usually awaits a new member. It 
 was unsuccessful, not from want of ability, but 
 because its tone did not suit the temper of 
 the House of Commons, and because a hostile 
 section of the audience sought to disconcert him 
 by their laughter. Undeterred by this ridi- 
 cule, he continued to speak, though in a less 
 ambitious and less artificial vein, till after a few 
 years he had become one of the most conspicuous 
 unofficial members. At first no one had eulo- 
 gised Peel more warmly, but after a time he 
 edged away from the minister, whether repelled 
 by his coldness, which showed that in that 
 quarter no promotion was to be expected, or 
 shrewdly perceiving that Peel was taking a line 
 which would ultimately separate him from the 
 bulk of the Conservative party. This happened 
 in 1846, when Peel, convinced that the import 
 duties on corn were economically unsound, pro- 
 posed their abolition. Disraeli, who, since 1S43, 
 had taken repeated opportunities of firing stray 
 shots at the powerful Prime Minister, now bore a 
 foremost part not only in attacking him, but in 
 organising the Protectionist party, and prompting 
 its leader, Lord George Bentinck. In embracing 
 free trade, Peel carried with him his own personal
 
 lo Biographical Studies 
 
 friends and disciples, men like Gladstone, Sidney 
 Herbert, Lord Lincoln, Sir James Graham, Card- 
 well, and a good many others, the intellectual ilite 
 of the Tory party. The more numerous section 
 who clung to Protection had numbers, wealth, 
 respectability, cohesion, but brains and tongues 
 were scarce. An adroit tactician and incisive 
 speaker was of priceless value to them. Such 
 a man they found in Disraeli, while he gained, 
 sooner than he had expected, an opportunity of 
 playing a leading part in the eyes of Parliament 
 and the country. In the end of 1848, Lord 
 George Bentinck, who, though a man of natural 
 force and capable of industry when he pleased, 
 had been to some extent Disraeli's mouthpiece, 
 died, leaving his prompter indisputably the keenest 
 intellect in the ToryT^rotectionist party. In 1850, 
 Peel, who might possibly have in time brought 
 the bulk of that party back to its allegiance 
 to him, was killed by a fall from his horse. 
 The Peelites drifted more and more towards 
 Liberalism, so that when Lord Derby, who, in 
 185 1, had been commissioned as head of the 
 Tory party to form a ministry, invited them to 
 join him, they refused to do so, imagining him 
 to be still in favour of the corn duties, and 
 resenting the behaviour of the Protectionist 
 section to their own master. Being thus un- 
 able to find one of them to lead his followers in 
 the House of Commons, Lord Derby turned in
 
 Lord Beaconsheld 1 1 
 
 1852 to Disraeli, giving him, with the leadership, 
 the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. The 
 appointment was thought a strange one, because 
 Disraeli brought to it absolutely no knowledge 
 of finance and no official experience. He had 
 never been so much as an Under-Secretary. 
 The Tories themselves murmured that one whom 
 they regarded as an adventurer should be raised 
 to so high a place. After a few months Lord 
 Derby's ministry fell, defeated on the Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer's Budget, which had been 
 vehemently attacked by ^Ir. Gladstone. This 
 was the beginning of that protracted duel between 
 him and Mr. Disraeli which lasted down till the 
 end of the latter's life. 
 
 For the following fourteen years Disraeli's 
 occupation was that of a leader of Op[)osition, 
 varied by one brief interval of office in 1858-59. 
 His party was in a permanent minority, so that 
 nothing was left for its chief but to fight with 
 skill, courage, and resolution a series of losing 
 battles. This he did with admirable tenacity of 
 purpose. Once or twice in every session he used 
 i;o rally his forces for a general engagement, and 
 though always defeated, he never suffered himselt 
 to be dispirited by defeat. During the rest of the 
 lime he was keenly watchful, exposing all the mis- 
 lakes in domestic affairs of the successive Liberal 
 Governments, and when complications arose in 
 foreign politics, always [professing, and generally
 
 12 Biographical Studies 
 
 manifesting, a patriotic desire not to embarrass 
 the Executive, lest national interests should suffer. 
 Through all these years he had to struggle, not 
 only with a hostile majority in office, but also 
 with disaffection among his own followers. Many 
 of the landed aristocracy could not bring them- 
 selves to acquiesce in the leadership of a new 
 man, of foreign origin, whose career had been 
 erratic, and whose ideas they found it hard to 
 assimilate. Ascribing their long exclusion from 
 power to his presence, they more than once 
 conspired to dethrone him. In 1861 these plots 
 were thickest, and Disraeli was for a time left 
 almost alone. But as it happened, there never 
 arose in the House of Commons any one on the 
 Conservative side possessing gifts of speech and 
 of strategy comparable to those which in him 
 had been matured and polished by long ex- 
 perience, while he had the address to acquire 
 an ascendency over the mind of Lord Derby, 
 still the titular head of the party, who, being 
 a man of straightforward character, high social 
 position, and brilliant oratorical talent, was there- 
 withal somewhat lazy and superficial, and there- 
 fore disposed to lean on his lieutenant in the 
 Lower House, and to borrow from him those 
 astute schemes of policy which Disraeli was fertile 
 in devising. Thus, through Lord Derby's support, 
 and by his own imperturbable confidence, he frus- 
 trated all the plots of the malcontent Tories.
 
 Lord Beaconsheld 13 
 
 New men came up who had not witnessed his 
 earHer escapades, but knew him only as the bold 
 and skilful leader of their party in the House of 
 Commons. He made himself personally agree- 
 able to them, encouraged them in their first 
 efforts, diffused his ideas among them, stimulated 
 the local organisation of the party, and held out 
 hopes of great things to be done when fortune 
 should at last revisit the Tory banner. 
 
 While Lord Palmerston lived, these exertions 
 seemed to bear little fruit. That minister had, in 
 his later years, settled down into a sort of prac- 
 tical Toryism, and both parties acquiesced in his 
 rule. But, on his death, the scene changed. 
 Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone brought forward 
 a Reform Bill strong enough to evoke the latent 
 Conservative feeling of a House of Commons 
 which, though showing a nominally LibtTal 
 majority, had been chosen under Palmerstonian 
 auspices. The defeat of the Bill, due to the de- 
 fection of the more timorous Whigs, was followed 
 by the resignation of Lord Russell's !^Iinistry. 
 Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli came into power, 
 and, next year, carried a Reform Bill which, as it 
 was finallyshaped in its passage through the House, 
 really went further than Lord Russell's had done. 
 enfranchising a much larger number of the working 
 classes in boroughs. To have carried this Bill 
 remains the greatest of Disraeli's triumphs. He 
 had to push it gently through a hostile House of
 
 14 Biographical Studies 
 
 Commons by wheedling a section of the Liberal 
 majority, against the appeals of their legitimate 
 leader. He had also to persuade his own followers 
 to support a measure which they had all their liv^es 
 been condemning, and which was, or in their view 
 ought to have been, more dangerous to the Con- 
 stitution than the one which they and the recal- 
 citrant Whigs had thrown out in the preceding 
 year. He had, as he happily and audaciously 
 expressed it, to educate his party into doing the 
 very thing which they (though certainly not he 
 himself) had cordially and consistently denounced. 
 The process was scarcely complete when the 
 retirement of Lord Derby, whose health had given 
 way, opened Disraeli's path to the post of first 
 jMinister of the Crown. He dissolved Parliament, 
 expecting to receive a majority from the gratitude 
 of the working class whom his Act had admitted 
 to the suffrage. To his own surprise, and to the 
 boundless disgust of the Tories, a Liberal House 
 of Commons was again returned, which drove him 
 and his friends once more into the cold shade of 
 Opposition. He was now sixty-four years of age, 
 had suffered an unexpected and mortifying dis- 
 comfiture, and had no longer the great name of 
 Lord Derby to cover him. Disaffected voices 
 were again heard among his own party, while the 
 Liberals, reinstalled in power, were led by the 
 rival whose unequalled popularity in the country 
 made him for the time omnipotent. Still Mr.
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 1 5 
 
 Disraeli was not disheartened. He fought the 
 battle of apparently hopeless resistance with his 
 old tact, wariness, and tenacity, losing no occasion 
 for any criticism that could damage the measures 
 strong and large measures which Mr. Glad- 
 stone's Government brought forward. 
 
 Before long the tide turned. The Dissenters 
 resented the Education Act of 1870. A reaction 
 in favour of Conservatism set in, which grew 
 so fast that, in 1874, the general election gave, for 
 the first time since 1846, a decided Conservative 
 majority. Mr. Disraeli became again Prime 
 Minister, and now a Prime ?ylinister no longer 
 on sufferance, but with the absolute command of 
 a dominant party, rising so much above the rest 
 of the Cabinet as to appear the sole author of its 
 policy. In 1876, feeling the weight of age, he 
 transferred himself to the House of Lords as 
 Earl of Beaconsfield. The policy he followed 
 (from 1876 till 1880) in the troubles which arose 
 in the Turkish East out of the insurrection in 
 Herzegovina and the massacres in Bulgaria, as 
 well as that subsequently pursued in Afghanistan 
 and in South Africa, while it received the enthusi- 
 astic approval of the soldiers, the stockbrokers, 
 and the richer classes generally, raised no less 
 vehement opposition in other sections of the 
 nation, and especially in those two which, when 
 heartily united and excited, have usually been 
 masters of Enc^land the Protestant Noncon-
 
 1 6 Biographical Studies 
 
 formists and the upper part of the working class. 
 An election foug-ht with unusual heat left him in 
 so decided a minority that he resigned office in 
 April 1880, without waiting for an adverse vote 
 in Parliament. When the result had become 
 clear he observed, " They," meaning his friends, 
 "will come in again, but I shall not." A year 
 later he died. 
 
 Here is a wonderful career, not less wonder- 
 ful to those who live in the midst of English 
 politics and society than it appears to observers 
 in other countries. A man with few external 
 advantages, not even that of education at a 
 university, where useful friendships are formed, 
 with grave positive disadvantages in his Jewish 
 extraction and the vagaries of his first years of 
 public life, presses forward, step by step, through 
 slights and disappointments which retard but never 
 dishearten him, assumes as of right the leadership 
 of a party the aristocratic party, the party in those 
 days peculiarly suspicious of new men and poor 
 men, wins a reputation for sagacity which makes 
 his early errors forgotten, becomes in old age the 
 favourite of a court, the master of a great country, 
 one of the three or four arbiters of Europe. 
 There is here more than one problem to solve, 
 or, at least, a problem with more than one aspect. 
 What was the true character of the man who had 
 sustained such a part? Did he hold any principles, 
 or was he merely playing with them as counters ?
 
 Lord Beaconsheld 1 7 
 
 By what gifts or arts did he win such a success ? 
 Was there really a mystery beneath the wizard's 
 robe which he delighted to wrap around him ? 
 And how, being so unlike the Englishmen among 
 whom his lot was cast, did he so fascinate and 
 rule them ? 
 
 Imagine a man of strong will and brilliant 
 intellectual powers, belonging to an ancient and 
 persecuted race, who finds himself born in a 
 foreign country, amid a people for whose ideas 
 and habits he has no sympathy and scant 
 respect. Suppose him proud, ambitious, self- 
 confident too ambitious to rest content in a 
 private station, so self-confident as to believe that 
 he can win whatever he aspires to. To achieve 
 success, he must bend his pride, must use the 
 language and humour the prejudices of those he 
 has to deal with ; while his pride avenges itself 
 by silent scorn or thinly disguised irony. Accus- 
 tomed to observe things from without, he discerns 
 the weak points of all political parties, the hollow- 
 ness of institutions and watchwords, the instability 
 of popular passion. If his imagination be more 
 susceptible than his emotions, his intellect more 
 active than his conscience, the isolation in which 
 he stands and the superior insight it affords him 
 may render him cold, calculating, self-centred. 
 The sentiment of personal honour may remain, 
 because his pride will support it ; and he will be 
 
 tenacious of the ideas which he has struck out, 
 
 c
 
 1 8 Biographical Studies 
 
 because they are his own. But for ordinary 
 principles of conduct he may have small regard, 
 because he has not grown up under the conven- 
 tional morality of the time and nation, but has 
 looked on it merely as a phenomenon to be 
 recognised and reckoned with, because he has 
 noted how much there is in it of unreality or 
 pharisaism how far it sometimes is from repre- 
 senting or expressing either the higher judgments 
 of philosophy or the higher precepts of religion. 
 Realising and perhaps exaggerating the power 
 of his own intelligence, he will secretly revolve 
 schemes of ambition wherein genius, uncon- 
 trolled by fears or by conscience, makes all 
 things bend to its purposes, till the scruples and 
 hesitations of common humanity seem to him 
 only parts of men's cowardice or stupidity. What 
 success he will win when he comes to carry out 
 such schemes in practice will largely depend on 
 the circumstances in which he finds himself, as 
 well as on his gift forjudging of them. He may 
 become a Napoleon. He may fall in a premature 
 collision with forces which want of sympathy has 
 prevented him from estimating. 
 
 In some of his novels, and most fully in the 
 first of them, Mr. Disraeli sketched a character 
 and foreshadowed a career not altogether unlike 
 that which has just been indicated. It would be 
 unfair to treat as autobiographical, though some 
 of his critics have done so, the picture of Vivian
 
 Lord Beaconsheld 19 
 
 Grey. What that singular book shows is that, 
 at an age when his contemporaries were lads at 
 college, absorbed in cricket matches or Latin 
 verse -making, Disraeli had already meditated 
 profoundly on the conditions and methods of 
 worldly success, had rejected the allurements of 
 pleasure and the attractions of literature, as well 
 as the ideal life of philosophy, had conceived of 
 a character isolated, ambitious, intense, resolute, 
 untrammelled by scruples, who moulds men to 
 his purposes by the sheer force of his intellect, 
 humouring their foibles, using their weaknesses, 
 and luring them into his chosen path by the bait 
 of self-interest. 
 
 To lay stress on the fact that Mr. Disraeli 
 was of Hebrew birth is not, though some of his 
 political antagonists stooped so to use it, to cast 
 any reproach upon him : it is only to note a fact 
 of the utmost importance for a proper compre- 
 hension of his position. The Jews were at the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century still foreigners 
 in England, not only on account of their religion, 
 with its mass of ancient rites and usages, but also 
 because they were filled with the memory of 
 centuries of persecution, and perceived that in 
 some parts of Europe the old spirit of hatred had 
 not died out. The antiquity of their race, their 
 sense of its long-suffering and isolation, their 
 pride in the intellectual achievements of those 
 ancestors whose blood, not largely mixed with
 
 2 Biographical Studies 
 
 that of any other race, flows in their veins, lead 
 the stronger or more reflective spirits to revenge 
 themselves by a kind of scorn upon the upstart 
 Western peoples among whom their lot is cast. 
 The mockery one finds in Heinrich Heine could 
 not have come from a Teuton. Even while imitat- 
 ing, as the wealthier of them have latterly begun 
 to imitate, the manners and luxury of those 
 nominal Christians among whom they live, they 
 retain their feeling of detachment, and are apt 
 to regard with a coldly observant curiosity the 
 beliefs, prejudices, enthusiasms of the nations of 
 Europe. The same passionate intensity which 
 makes the grandeur of the ancient Hebrew 
 literature still lives among them, though often 
 narrowed by ages of oppression, and gives them 
 the peculiar effectiveness that comes from turning 
 all the powers of the mind, imaginative as well as 
 reasoning, into a single channel, be that channel 
 what it may. They produce, in proportion to 
 their numbers, an unusually large number of able 
 and successful men, as any one may prove by 
 recounting the eminent Jews of the last seventy 
 years. This success has most often been won in 
 practical life, in commerce, or at the bar, or in 
 the press (which over the European continent 
 they so largely control) ; yet often also in the 
 higher walks of literature or science, less fre- 
 quently in art, most frequently in music. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli had three of these characteristics
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 2 1 
 
 of his race in full measure detachment, intensity, 
 the passion for material success. Nature gave 
 him a resolute will, a keen and precociously active 
 intellect, a vehement individuality ; that is to 
 say, a consciousness of his own powers, and a 
 determination to make them recognised by his 
 fellows. In some men, the passion to succeed is 
 clogged by the fear of failure ; in others, the 
 sense of their greatness is self-sufficing and 
 indisposes them to effort. But with him ambi- 
 tion spurred self-confidence, and self-confidence 
 justified ambition. He grew up in a cultivated 
 home, familiar not only with books but with the 
 brightest and most polished men and women of 
 the day, whose conversation sharpened his wits 
 almost from childhood. No religious influences 
 worked upon him, for his father had ceased to 
 be a Jew in faith without becoming even 
 nominallv a Christian, and there is little in his 
 writings to show that he had ever felt anything 
 more than an imaginative, or what may be called an 
 historical, interest in religion.^ Thus his develop- 
 ment was purely intellectual. The society he moved 
 in was a society of men and women of the world 
 witty, superficial in its interests, without serious- 
 
 ' That historical interest he did feel deeply. (J>ne might almost say 
 of him that he was a Christian because lie was a Jew, for Christianity was 
 to him the proper development of the ancient religion of Israel. "The 
 Jews," he observes in \\\c Life of J.onl Geoi-ge Bentinck, " rejiresent the 
 Semitic principle, all that is mo.st spiritual in our nature. . . . It is dejilor- 
 able that several millions of Jews still jiersist in believing only .1 part of 
 their religion."
 
 2 2 Biographical Studies 
 
 ness or reverence. He felt himself no English- 
 man, and watched English life and politics as a 
 student of natural history might watch the habits 
 of bees or ants. English society was then, and 
 perhaps is still, more complex, more full of in- 
 consistencies, of contrasts between theory and 
 practice, between appearances and realities, than 
 that of any other country. Nowhere so much 
 limitation of view among the fashionable, so much 
 pharisaism among the respectable, so much vul- 
 garity among the rich, mixed with so much real 
 earnestness, benevolence, and good sense ; nowhere, 
 therefore, so much to seem merely ridiculous to 
 one who looked at it from without, wanting the 
 sympathy which comes from the love of mankind, 
 or even from the love of one's country. It was 
 natural for a young man with Disraeli's gifts to 
 mock at what he saw. But he would not sit 
 still in mere contempt. The thirst for power 
 and fame gave him no rest. He must gain what 
 he saw every one around him struggling for. 
 He must triumph over these people whose follies 
 amused him ; and the sense that he perceived 
 and could use their follies would add zest to 
 his triumph. He might have been a great 
 satirist ; he resolved to become a great statesman. 
 For such a career, his Hebrew detachment gave 
 him some eminent advantages. It enabled him 
 to take a cooler and more scientific view of the 
 social and political phenomena he had to deal
 
 Lord Beaconsheld 23 
 
 with. He was not led astray by party cries. 
 He did not share vulgar prejudices. He calcu- 
 lated the forces at work as an engineer calculates 
 the strength of his materials, the strain they have 
 to bear from the wind, and the weights they 
 must support. And what he had to plan was 
 not the success of a cause, which might depend 
 on a thousand things out of his ken, but his own 
 success, a simpler matter. 
 
 A still greater source of strength lay in his 
 Hebrew intensity. It would have pleased him, 
 so full of pride in the pure blood of his race,' 
 to attribute to that purity the singular power 
 of concentration which the Jews undoubtedly 
 possess. They have the faculty of throwing the 
 whole stress of their natures into the pursuit of 
 one object, fixing their eyes on it alone, sacri- 
 ficing to it other desires, clinging to it even when 
 it seems unattainable. Disraeli was only twenty- 
 eight when he made his first attempt to enter 
 the House of Commons. Four repulses did 
 not discourage him, though his means were but 
 scanty to support such contests ; and the fifth 
 
 ' Though it has been maintained that in the Dark and Middle Arjes a 
 considerable number of Gentiles found their way into Jewish communities 
 and became Judaised. 
 
 The high average of intellectual power among the Jews need not be 
 attributed to purity of race ; it is sufticiently ex[)lained by their history. 
 Nor is it clear that where two of the more advanced races are mixed by 
 intermarriage, the product is inferior to either of the parent stocks. On 
 the contrary, such a mixture, t-.;'. of Teutonic and Slavonic blood, or of 
 Celtic and Teutonic, gives a result at least ccjual in ca[iacity to either of 
 the pure-blooded races which liave been so commingled.
 
 24 Biographical Studies 
 
 time he succeeded. When his first speech in 
 Parliament had been received with laughter, and 
 politicians were congratulating themselves that 
 this adventurer had found his level, he calmly 
 told them that he had always ended by suc- 
 ceeding in whatever he attempted, and that 
 he would succeed in this too. He received no 
 help from his own side, who regarded him with 
 suspicion, but forced hinibclf into prominence, 
 and at last to leadership, by his complete superi- 
 ority to rebuffs. Through the long years in 
 which he had to make head against a majority 
 in the House of Commons, he never seemed 
 disheartened by his repeated defeats, never re- 
 laxed the vigilance with which he watched his 
 adversaries, never indulged himself (though he 
 was physically indolent and often in poor health) 
 by staying away from Parliament, even when 
 business was slack ; never missed an opportunity 
 for exposing a blunder of his adversaries, or 
 commending the good service of one of his 
 own followers. The same curious tenacity was 
 apparent in his ideas. Before he was twenty- 
 two years of age he had, under the inspiration 
 of Bolingbroke, excogitated a theory of the 
 Constitution of England, of the way England 
 should be governed at home and her policy 
 directed abroad, from which he hardly swerved 
 through all his later life. Often as he was 
 accused of inconsistency, he probably believed
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 25 
 
 himself to be, and in a sense he was, sub- 
 stantially faithful, I will not say to the same 
 doctrines, but to the same notions or tendencies ; 
 and one could discover from the phrases he em- 
 ployed how he fancied himself to be really follow- 
 ing out these old notions, even when his conduct 
 seemed opposed to the traditions of his party/ 
 The weakness of intense minds is their tendency 
 to narrowness, and this weakness was in so far 
 his that, while always ready for new expedients, 
 he was not accessible to new ideas. Indeed, 
 the old ideas were too much a part of himself, 
 stamped with his own individuality, to be forsaken 
 or even varied. He did not love knowledge, nor 
 enjoy speculation for its own sake ; he valued 
 views as they pleased his imagination or as they 
 carried practical results with them ; and having 
 framed his theory once for all and worked steadily 
 upon its lines, he was not the man to admit that 
 it had been defective, and to set himself in later 
 life to repair it. His pride was involved in 
 proving it correct by applying it. 
 
 With this resolute concentration of purpose 
 there went an undaunted courage a quality less 
 rare among English statesmen, but eminently 
 
 ' lie had an intellectual arrogance, whicli made him dislike what 
 may be called the Radical cf)nception of human equality. In the Life 
 of Lord Gi'or^c Bentiiirk he remarks, "The lews are a living and the 
 most striking evidence of the falsity of that ])ernici<)us doctrine of modern 
 
 times, the natural equality of man Ml the tendencies of the Jewish 
 
 race are conservative. Their bias is to religion, projjerty, and natural 
 aristocracy."
 
 2 6 Biographical Studies 
 
 laudable in him, because for great part of his 
 career he had no family or party connections to 
 back him up, but was obliged to face the world 
 with nothing but his own self-confidence. So far 
 from seeking to conceal his Jewish origin, he dis- 
 played his pride in it, and refused all support to 
 the efforts which the Tory party made to maintain 
 the exclusion of Jews from Parliament. Nobody 
 showed more self-possession and (except on two 
 or three occasions) more perfect self-command in 
 the hot strife of Parliament than this suspected 
 stranger. His opponents learnt to fear one who 
 never feared for himself ; his followers knew that 
 their chief would not fail them in the hour of 
 danger. His very face and bearing had in them 
 an impassive calmness which magnetised those 
 who watched him. He liked to surround himself 
 with mystery, to pose as remote, majestic, self- 
 centred, to appear above the need of a confidant. 
 He would sit for hours on his bench in the House 
 of Commons, listening with eyes half-shut to furious 
 assaults on himself and his policy, not showing by 
 the movement of a muscle that he had felt a 
 wound ; and when he rose to reply would discharge 
 his sarcasms with an air of easy coolness. That 
 this indifference was sometimes simulated appeared 
 by the resentment he showed afterwards. 
 
 Ambition such as his could not afford to be 
 scrupulous, nor have his admirers ever claimed 
 conscientiousness as one of his merits. One who
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 27 
 
 sets power and fame before him as the main 
 ends to be pursued may no doubt be restrained 
 by pride from the use of such means as are 
 obviously low and dishonourable. Other ques- 
 tionable means he may reject because he knows 
 that the opinion of those whose good-will and 
 good word he must secure would condemn them. 
 But he will not be likely to allow kindliness or 
 compassion to stand in his way ; nor will he be 
 very regardful of truth. To a statesman, who 
 must necessarily have many facts in his know- 
 ledge, or many plans in his mind, which the 
 interests of his colleagues, or of his party, or of 
 the nation, forbid him to reveal, the temptation to 
 put questioners on a false scent, and to seem to 
 agree where he really dissents, is at all times a 
 strong one. An honest man may sometimes be 
 betrayed into yielding to it ; and those who know 
 how difficult are the cases of conscience that arise 
 will not deal harshly with a possibly misleading 
 silence, or even with the evasion of an embar- 
 rassing inquiry, where a real public interest can 
 be pleaded, for the existence of such a public 
 interest, if it does not justify, may palliate omis- 
 sions to make a full disclosure of the facts. All 
 things considered, the standard of truthfulness 
 among English public men has (of course with 
 some conspicuous exceptions) been a high one. 
 Of that standard Disraeli fell short. People did 
 not take his word for a thing as they would have
 
 2 8 Biographical Studies 
 
 taken the word of the Duke of WelHngton, or 
 Lord Althorp, or Lord Derby, or Lord Russell, 
 or even of that not very rigid moralist, Lord 
 Palmerston. Instances of his lapses were not 
 wanting as late as 1877. His behaviour toward 
 Sir Robert Peel, whom he plied with every dart 
 of sarcasm, after having shortly before lavished 
 praises on him, and sought office under him, has 
 often been commented on.^ Disraeli was himself 
 (as those who knew him have often stated) accus- 
 tomed to justify it by observing that he was 
 then an insignificant personage, to whom it was 
 supremely important to attract public notice anti 
 make a political position ; that the opportunity 
 of attacking the powerful Prime Minister, at a 
 moment when their altered attitude towards the 
 Corn Laws had exposed the Ministry to the sus- 
 picions of their own party, was too good to be 
 lost ; and that he was therefore obliged to assail 
 Peel, though he had himself no particular attach- 
 ment to the Corn Laws, and believed Peel to have 
 been a bona- fide convert. It was therefore no 
 personal resentment against one who had slighted 
 him, but merely the exigencies of his own career, 
 that drove him to this course, whose fortunate 
 result proved the soundness of his calculations, 
 
 ^ On one occasion he went so far as to deny tlial he liad asked Peel for 
 office, relying on the fact that the letter which contained the rerjuest was 
 marked "private," so that Peel could not use it to disprove his state- 
 ment {Letters of Sir Jxohert Peel, by C. S. Parker, vol. ii. p. 486 ; vol. 
 iii. pj). 347. 34S).
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 29 
 
 This defence will not surprise any one who 
 is familiar with Disraeli's earlier novels. These 
 stories are as far as possible from being immoral ; 
 that is to say, there is nothing in them unbecoming 
 or corrupting. Friendship, patriotism, love, are 
 all recognised as powerful and worthy motives of 
 conduct. That which is wanting is the sense of 
 right and wrong. His personages have for certain 
 purposes the conventional sense of honour, though 
 seldom a fine sense, but they do not ask whether 
 such and such a course is conformable to principle. 
 They move in a world which is polished, agree- 
 able, dignified, averse to baseness and vulgarity, 
 but in which conscience and religion scarcely 
 seem to exist. The men live for pleasure or 
 fame, the women for pleasure or love. 
 
 Some allowance must, of course, be made for 
 the circumstances of Disraeli's position and early 
 training. He was brought up neither a Jew nor 
 a Christian. The elder people who took him 
 by the hand when he entered life, people like 
 Samuel Rogers and Lady Blessington. were not 
 the people to give lessons in morality. Lord 
 Lyndhurst, the first of his powerful political 
 friends, and the man whose example most affected 
 him, was, with all his splendid gifts, conspicuously 
 wanting in political principle. Add to this the 
 isolation in which the young man found himself, 
 standing outside the common stream of English 
 life, not sharing its sentiments, perceiving the
 
 30 Biographical Studies 
 
 hollowness of much that passed for virtue and 
 patriotism, and it is easy to understand how he 
 should have been as perfect a cynic at twenty- 
 five as their experience of the world makes many 
 at sixty. If he had loved truth or mankind, he 
 might have quickly worked through his youthful 
 cynicism. But pride and ambition, the pride of 
 race and the pride of genius, left no room for 
 these sentiments. Nor was his cynicism the fruit 
 merely of a keen and sceptical intelligence. It 
 came from a cold heart. 
 
 The pursuit of fame and power, to which he 
 gave all his efforts, is presented in his writings as 
 the only alternative ideal to a life of pleasure ; and 
 he probably regarded those who pursued some 
 other as either fools or weaklings. Early in his 
 political life he said one night to Mr. Bright 
 (from whom I heard the anecdote), as they took 
 their umbrellas in the cloak-room of the House 
 of Commons : " After all, what is it that brings 
 you and me here ? Fame ! This is the true 
 arena. I might have occupied a literary throne ; 
 but I have renounced it for this career." The 
 external pomps and trappings of life, titles, stately 
 houses and far-spreading parks, all those gauds and 
 vanities with which sumptuous wealth surrounds 
 itself, had throughout his life a singular fascination 
 for him. He liked to mock at them in his novels, 
 but they fascinated him none the less. One can 
 understand how they might fire the imagination
 
 Lord Beaconsheld 3 i 
 
 of an ambitious youth who saw them from a 
 distance might even retain their charm for one 
 who was just struggling into the society which 
 possessed them, and who desired to feel himself 
 the equal of the possessors. It is stranger that, 
 when he had harnessed the English aristocracy 
 to his chariot, and was driving them where he 
 pleased, he should have continued to admire such 
 things. So, however, it was. There was even 
 in him a vein of inordinate deference to rank 
 and wealth which would in a less eminent person 
 have been called snobbishness. In his will he 
 directs that his estate of Hughenden Manor, in 
 Buckinghamshire, shall pass under an entail as 
 strict as he could devise, that the person who 
 succeeds to it shall always bear the name of 
 Disraeli. His ambition Is the common, not to 
 say vulgar, ambition of the English parvenu, 
 to found a "county family." In his story of 
 Endymion, published a few months before his 
 death, the hero, starting from small beginnings, 
 ends by becoming prime minister : this is the 
 crown of his career, the noblest triumph an 
 Englishman can achieve. It might have been 
 thought that one who had been through it all, 
 who had realised the dreams of his boyhood, who 
 had every opportunity of learning w^hat power 
 and fame come to, would have liked to set forth 
 some other conception of the end of human life, 
 or would not have told the world so naively of his
 
 3 2 Biographical Studies 
 
 self-content at having attained the aim he had 
 worked for. With most men the flower they have 
 plucked withers. It might have been expected 
 that one who was in other things an ironical cynic 
 would at least have sought to seem disillusionised. 
 To say that Disraeli's heart was somewhat 
 cold is by no means to say that he was heartless. 
 He was one of those strong natures who permit 
 neither persons nor principles to stand in their 
 way. His doctrine was that politics had nothing 
 to do with sentiment ; so those who appealed to 
 him on grounds of humanity appealed in vain. 
 No act of his life ever so much offended English 
 opinion as the airy fashion in which he tossed aside 
 the news of the Bulgarian massacre of 1876. It 
 incensed sections who were strong enough, when 
 thoroughly roused, to bring about his fall. But 
 he was far from being unkindly. He knew how 
 to attach men to him by friendly deeds as well as 
 friendly words. He seldom missed an oppor- 
 tunity of saying something pleasant and cheering 
 to a debutant in Parliament, whether of his own 
 party or the opposite. He was not selfish in 
 little things ; was always ready to consider the 
 comfort and convenience of those who surrounded 
 him. Age and success, so far from making him 
 morose or supercilious, softened the asperities of 
 his character and developed the affectionate side 
 of it. His last novel, published a few months 
 before his death, contains more human kindliness,
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 33 
 
 a fuller recognition of the worth of friendship and 
 the beauty of sisterly and conjugal love, than do 
 the writings of his earlier manhood. What it 
 wants in intellectual power it makes up for in a 
 mellower and more tender tone. Of loyalty to 
 his political friends he was a model, and nothing 
 did more to secure his command of the party 
 than its sense that his professional honour, so to 
 speak, could be implicitly relied upon. To his 
 wife, a warm-hearted woman older than himself, 
 and inferior to him in education, he was uni- 
 formly affectionate and indeed devoted. The 
 first use he made of his power as Prime 
 Minister was to procure for her the title of 
 viscountess. Being once asked point blank by a 
 lady what he thought of his life-long opponent, 
 Mr. Gladstone answered that two things had 
 always struck him as very admirable in Lord 
 Beaconsfield's character his perfect loyalty to 
 his wife, and his perfect loyalty to his own race. 
 A story used to be told how, in Disraeli's earlier 
 days, when his political position was still far from 
 assured, he and his wife happened to be the 
 guests of the chief of the party, and that chief so 
 far forgot good manners as to quiz Mrs. Disraeli 
 at the dinner- table. Next morning Disraeli, 
 whose visit was to have lasted for some days 
 longer, announced that he must leave immediately. 
 The host besought him to stay, and made all 
 possible apologies. But Disraeli was inexorable,
 
 34 Biographical Studies 
 
 and carried off his wife forthwith. To Hterary 
 men, whatever their opinions, he was ready to 
 give a helping hand, representing himseU' as one 
 of their profession. In paying compliments he 
 was singularly expert, and few used the art so well 
 to win friends and disarm enemies. He knew how 
 to please Englishmen, and especially the young, 
 by showing interest in their tastes and pleasures, 
 and, without being what would be called genial, 
 was never wanting in bonhomie. In society he 
 was a perfect man of the world told his anec- 
 dote apropos, wound up a discussion by some 
 epigrammatic phrase, talked to the guest next 
 him, if he thought that guest's position made him 
 worth talking to, as he would to an old acquaint- 
 ance. But he had few intimates ; nor did his 
 apparent frankness unveil his real thoughts. 
 
 He was not of those who complicate political 
 opposition with private hatreds. Looking on 
 politics as a game, he liked, when he took off 
 his armour, to feel himself on friendly terms with 
 his antagonists, and often seemed surprised to 
 find that they remembered as personal affronts 
 the blows which lie had dealt in the tournament. 
 Two or three years before his death, a friend 
 asked him whether there was in London any one 
 with whom he would not shake hands. Reflect- 
 ing for a moment, he answered, " Only one," and 
 named Robert Lowe, who had said hard things of 
 him, and to whom, when Lowe was on one occasion
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 35 
 
 in his power, he had behaved with cruelty. Yet 
 his resentments could smoulder long. In Lothair 
 he attacked, under a thin disguise, a distinguished 
 man of letters who had criticised his conduct years 
 before. In Endyniiou he gratified what was evi- 
 dently an ancient grudge by a spiteful presentation 
 of Thackeray, as he had indulged his more bitter 
 dislike of John Wilson Croker by portraying 
 that politician in Coningsby under the name of 
 Nicholas Rigby. For the greatest of his ad- 
 versaries he felt, there is reason to believe, 
 genuine admiration, mingled with inability to 
 comprehend a nature so unlike his own. No 
 passage in the striking speech which that ad- 
 versary pronounced, one might almost say, over 
 Lord Beaconsfield's grave a speech which may 
 possibly go down to posterity w^ith its subject- 
 was more impressive than the sentence in which 
 he declared that he had the best reason to believe 
 that, in their constant warfare. Lord Beaconsfield 
 had not been actuated by any personal hostility. 
 Brave men, if they can respect, seldom dislike, a 
 formidable antaofonist. 
 
 His mental powers were singularly well suited 
 to the rest of his character were, so to speak, 
 all of a piece with it. One sometimes sees in- 
 tellects which are out of keeping with the active 
 or emotional parts of the man. One sees persons 
 whose thought is vigorous, clear, comprehensive, 
 while their conduct is timid ; or a comparatively
 
 36 Biographical Studies 
 
 narrow intelligence joined to an enterprising 
 spirit ; or a sober, reflective, sceptical turn of mind 
 yoked to an ardent and impulsive temperament. 
 What we call the follies of the wise often spring 
 from some such source. Not so with him. His 
 intelligence had the same boldness, intensity, con- 
 centration, directness, which we discover in the 
 rest of the man. It was just the right instru- 
 ment, not perhaps for the normal career of a 
 normal Englishman seeking political success, but 
 for the particular kind of work Disraeli had 
 planned to do ; and this inner harmony was one 
 of the chief causes of his success, as the want of it 
 has caused the failure of so many gifted natures. 
 
 The range of his mind was not wide. All its 
 products were like one another. No one of them 
 gives the impression that Disraeli could, had he so 
 wished, have succeeded in a wholly diverse line. 
 It was a peculiar mind : there is even more variety 
 in minds than in faces. It was not logical or dis- 
 cursive, liking to mass and arrange stores of know- 
 ledge, and draw inferences from them, nor was it 
 judicial, with a turn for weighing reasons and 
 reaching a decision which recognises all the facts 
 and is not confused by their seeming contradic- 
 tions. Neither was it analytically subtle. It 
 reached its conclusions by a process of intuition 
 or divination in which there was an imaginative 
 as well as a reflective element. It might almost 
 have been called an artist's mind, capable of deep
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 37 
 
 meditation, but meditating in an imaginative way, 
 not so much on facts as on its own views of 
 facts, on the pictures which its own creative 
 faculty had called up. The meditation became 
 dreamy, but the dreaminess was corrected by an 
 exceedingly keen and quick power of observation, 
 not the scientific observation of the philosopher, 
 but rather the enjoying observation of the artist 
 who sees how he can use the characteristic 
 details which he notes, or the observation of 
 the forensic advocate (an artist, too, in his way) 
 who perceives how they can be fitted into the pre- 
 sentation of his case. There are, of course, other 
 qualities in Disraeli's work. As a statesman he 
 was obliged to learn how to state facts, to argue, 
 to dissect an opponent's arguments. But the 
 characteristic note, both of his speeches and of 
 his writings, is the combination of a few large 
 ideas, clear, perhaps, to himself, but generally 
 expressed with grandiose vagueness, and often 
 quite out of relation to the facts as other people 
 saw them, with a turn for acutely fastening 
 upon small incidents or personal traits. In his 
 speeches he used his command of sonorous 
 phrases and lively illustrations, sometimes to 
 support the views he was advancing, but more 
 frequently to conceal the weakness of those 
 views ; that is, to make up for the absence of 
 such solid arguments as were likely to move his 
 hearers. Everybody is now and then conscious
 
 38 Biographical Studies 
 
 of holding with assured conviction theories which 
 he would find it hard to prove to a given 
 audience, partly because it is too much trouble 
 to trace out the process by which they were 
 reached, partly because uninstructed listeners 
 could not be made to feel the full cogency of 
 the considerations on which his own mind 
 relies, Disraeli was usually in this condition 
 with regard to his political and social doctrines. 
 He believed them, but as he had not reached 
 them by logic, he was not prepared to use 
 logic to establish them ; so he picked up some 
 plausible illustration, or attacked the opposite 
 doctrine and its supporters with a fire of raillery 
 or invective. This non-ratiocinative quality of 
 his thinking was a source both of strength and 
 of weakness of weakness, because he could 
 not prove his propositions ; of strength, because, 
 stated as he stated them, it was not less hard 
 to disprove them. That mark of a superior 
 mind, that it must have a theory, was never 
 wanting. Some one said of him that he was 
 "the ruins of a thinker." He could not rest 
 content, like many among his followers, with a 
 prejudice, a dogma delivered by tradition, a stolid 
 suspicion unamenable to argument. He would 
 not acquiesce in negation. He must have a 
 theory, a positive theory, to show not only that 
 his antagonist's view was erroneous, but that he 
 had himself a more excellent way. These theories
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 39 
 
 generally had in them a measure of truth and 
 value for any one who could analyse them ; but 
 as this was exactly what the rank and file of the 
 party could not do, they got into sad confusion 
 when they tried to talk his language. 
 
 He could hardly be called a well-read man, 
 nor were his intellectual interests numerous. His 
 education had consisted mainly in promiscuous 
 reading during boyhood and early youth. There 
 are worse kinds of education for an active in- 
 telligence than to let it have the run of a large 
 library. The wild browsings of youth, when 
 curiosity is strong as hunger, stir the mind and 
 give the memory some of the best food it ever 
 gets. The weak point of such a method is that it 
 does not teach accuracy nor the art of systematic 
 study. In middle life natural indolence and his 
 political occupations had kept Disraeli from filling 
 up the gaps in his knowledge, while, in conversa- 
 tion, what he liked best was persiflage. He 
 was, however, tolerably familiar with the ancient 
 classics, and with modern English and French 
 literature; enjoyed Quintilian and Lucian, preferred 
 Sophocles to /Eschylus and (apparently) Horace 
 to Virgil, despised Browning, considered Tenny- 
 son the best of contemporary poets, but " not a 
 poet of a high order." ^ Physical science seems 
 never to have attracted him. Political economy 
 
 ^ See Sir S. Northcote"s refiort of a conversation with Disraeli in his 
 last years {Life of Sir Statford A'orthcote, vol. ii.).
 
 40 Biographical Studies 
 
 he hated and mocked at almost as heartily as 
 did Carlyle. People have measured his know- 
 ledge of history and geography by observing 
 that he placed the Crucifixion in the lifetime 
 of Augustus, and thought, down till 1878, when 
 he had to make a speech about Afghanistan, that 
 the Andes were the highest mountains in the 
 world. But geography is a subject which a man 
 of affairs does not think of reading up in later 
 life : he is content if he can get information 
 when he needs it. There are some bits of meta- 
 physics and some historical allusions scattered 
 over his novels, but these are mostly slight or 
 superficial. He amused himself and the public 
 by now and then propounding doctrines on agri- 
 cultural matters, but would not appear to have 
 mastered either husbandry or any other economi- 
 cal or commercial subject. Such things were not 
 in his way. He had been so little in office as 
 not to have been forced to apply himself to them, 
 while the tide of pure intellectual curiosity had 
 long since ebbed. 
 
 For so-called " sports " he had little taste. He 
 liked to go mooning in a meditative way round his 
 fields and copses, and he certainly enjoyed Nature ; 
 but there seems to be no solid evidence that the 
 primrose was his favourite flower. In his fond- 
 ness for particular words and phrases there 
 was a touch of his artistic quality, and a touch 
 also of the cynical view that words are the
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 41 
 
 counters with which the wise play their game. 
 There is a passage in Contariiii Fleming (a story 
 into which he has put a good deal of himself) 
 where this is set out. Contarini tells his father 
 that he left college " because they taught me only 
 words, and I wished to learn ideas." His father 
 answers, " Few ideas are correct ones, and what 
 are correct, no one can ascertain ; but with words 
 we govern men." 
 
 He went on acting on this belief in the power 
 of words till he became the victim of his own 
 phrases, just as people who talk cynically for 
 effect grow sometimes into real cynics. When 
 he had invented a phrase which happily expressed 
 the aspect he wished his view, or some part of his 
 policy, to bear, he came to believe in the phrase, 
 and to think that the facts were altered by the 
 colour the phrase put upon them. During the 
 contest for the extension of the parliamentary 
 franchise, he declared himself " in favour of 
 popular privileges, but opposed to democratic 
 rights." When he was accused of having as- 
 sented, at the Congress of Berlin, to the dis- 
 memberment of the Turkish Empire, he said 
 that what had been done was "not dismember- 
 ment, but consolidation." No statesman of recent 
 times has given currency to so many quasi-epi- 
 grammatic expressions: "organised hyj^ocrisy," 
 "England dislikes coalitions," "plundering and 
 blundering," "peace with honour," '^ iuipcriuni
 
 42 Biographical Studies 
 
 et libertas,'' "a scientific frontier," "I am on 
 the side of the angels," are a few, not perhaps 
 the best, though the best remembered, of the 
 many which issued from his fertile mint. This 
 turn for epigram, not common in England, 
 sometimes led him into scrapes which would 
 have damaged a man of less imperturbable 
 coolness. No one else could have ventured to 
 say, when he had induced the Tories to pass 
 a Reform Bill stronger than the one they had 
 rejected from the Liberals in the preceding 
 year, that it had been his mission " to educate 
 his party." Some of his opponents professed 
 to be shocked by such audacity, and many 
 old Tories privily gnashed their teeth. But the 
 country received the dictum in the spirit in which 
 it was spoken. "It was Disraeli all over." 
 
 If his intellect was not of wide range, it was 
 within its range a weapon of the finest flexibility 
 and temper. It was ingenious, ready, incisive. 
 It detected in a moment the weak point, if not of 
 an argument, yet of an attitude or of a character. 
 Its imaginative quality made it often picturesque, 
 sometimes even impressive. Disraeli had the 
 artist's delight in a situation for its own sake, and 
 what people censured as insincerity or frivolity was 
 frequently only the zest which he felt in posing, 
 not so much because there was anything to be 
 gained, as because he realised his aptitude for 
 improvising a new part in the drama which he
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 43 
 
 always felt himself to be playing. The humour of 
 the situation was too good to be wasted. Perhaps 
 this love of merry mischief may have had some- 
 thing to do with his tendency to confer honours 
 on those whom the world thouo^ht least deserving. 
 His books are not only a valuable revelation 
 of his mind, but have more literary merit than 
 critics have commonly allowed to them, perhaps 
 because we are apt, when a man excels in one 
 walk, to deem him to have failed in any other 
 wherein he does not reach the same level. The 
 novels foam over with cleverness ; indeed, Vivian 
 Grey, with all its youthful faults, gives as great 
 an impression of intellectual brilliance as does 
 anything Disraeli ever wrote or spoke. Their 
 easy fertility makes them seem to be only, 
 so to speak, a few sketches out of a large 
 portfolio. There is some variety in the sub- 
 jects Coniariiii Fleming and Tajicrcd are 
 more romantic than the others, Sybil and Con- 
 ingsby more political as well as in the merits 
 of the stories. The two latest, Lothair and 
 Bndy77iioii, works of his old age, are markedly 
 inferior in spirit and invention ; but the general 
 features are the same in all a lively fancy, a 
 knack of hitting characters off in a few lines and 
 of catching the superficial as[)ects of society, a 
 brisk narrative, a sprightly dialogue, a keen insight 
 into the selfishness of men and the vanities ot 
 women, with Hashes of wit lighting up the whole
 
 44 Biographical Studies 
 
 stage. It Is always a stage. The brilliance 
 is never open-air sunshine. There is scarcely one 
 of the characters whom we feel we might have 
 met and known. Heroes and heroines are 
 theatrical figures ; their pathos rings false, their 
 love, though described as passionate, does not 
 spring from the inner recesses of the soul. The 
 studies of men of the world, and particularly of 
 heartless ones, are the most life-like ; yet, even 
 here, any one who wants to feel the difference 
 between the great painter and the clever sketcher 
 need only compare Thackeray's Marquis of 
 Steyne with Disraeli's Marquis of Monmouth, 
 both of them suggested by the same original. 
 There is little intensity, little dramatic power 
 in these stories, as also in his play of Alarcos ; 
 and if we read them with pleasure it is not 
 for the sake either of plot or of character, 
 but because they contain so many sparkling 
 witticisms and reflections, setting in a strong 
 light, yet not always an unkindly light, the seamy 
 side of politics and human nature. The slovenli- 
 ness of their style, which is often pompous, but 
 seldom pure, makes them appear to have been 
 written hastily. But Disraeli seems to have 
 taken the composition of them (except, perhaps, 
 the two latest) quite seriously. When he wrote 
 the earlier tales, he meant to achieve literary 
 greatness ; while the middle ones, especially 
 Coningsby and Sybil were designed as political
 
 Lord Beaconsfleld 45 
 
 manifestoes. The less they have a purpose or 
 profess to be serious, the better they are ; and 
 the most vivacious of all are two classical bur- 
 lesques, written at a time when that kind of 
 composition had not yet become common 
 Ixion in Heaven and The Infernal Marriage 
 little pieces of funning worthy of Thackeray, 
 I had almost said of Voltaire. They recall, 
 perhaps they were suggested by, similar pieces 
 of Lucian's. Is Semitic genius specially rich in 
 this mocking vein ? Lucian was a Syrian from 
 Samosata, probably a Semite ; Heinrich Heine 
 was a Semite ; James Russell Lowell used to 
 insist, though he produced little evidence for his 
 belief, that Voltaire was a Semite. 
 
 Whether Disraeli could ever have taken high 
 rank as a novelist if he had thrown himself com- 
 pletely into the profession may be doubted, for his 
 defects were such as pains and practice would hardly 
 have lessened. That he had still less the imagina- 
 tion needed by a poet, his Revohitionary Epick, con- 
 ceived on the plains of Troy, and meant to make 
 a fourth to the Iliad, the ^Eneid, and the Dii'iva 
 Comniedia, is enough to show. The literary 
 vocation he was best fitted for was that of a 
 journalist or pamphleteer ; and in this he might 
 have won unrivalled success. His dash, his 
 verve, his brilliancy of illustration, his scorching 
 satire, would have made the fortune of any news- 
 paper, and carried dismay into the enemy's ranks.
 
 46 Biographical Studies 
 
 In inquiring how far the gifts I have sought to 
 describe qualified Disraeli for practical statesman- 
 ship, it is well to distinguish the different kinds 
 of capacity which an English politician needs to 
 attain the highest place. They may be said to 
 be four. He must be a debater. He must be a 
 parliamentary tactician. He must understand the 
 country. He must understand Europe. This last 
 is, indeed, not always necessary ; there have been 
 moments when England, leaving Europe to itself, 
 may look to her own affairs only; but when the 
 sky grows stormy over Europe, the want of know- 
 ledge which English statesmen sometimes evince 
 may bode disaster. 
 
 An orator, in the highest sense of the word, 
 Disraeli never was. He lacked ease and fluency. 
 He had not Pitt's turn for the lucid exposition of 
 complicated facts, nor for the conduct of a close 
 argument. The sustained and fiery declamation of 
 Fox was equally beyond his range. And least of 
 all had he that truest index of eloquence, the power 
 of touching the emotions. He could not make his 
 hearers weep. But he could make them laugh ; 
 he could put them in good-humour with them- 
 selves ; he could dazzle them with rhetoric ; 
 he could pour upon an opponent streams of 
 ridicule more effective than the hottest indigna- 
 tion. When he sought to be profound or solemn, 
 he was usually heavy and laboured the sublimity 
 often false, the diction often stilted. For wealth
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 47 
 
 of thought or splendour of language his speeches 
 will not bear to be compared I will not say with 
 those of Burke (on whom he sometimes tried to 
 model himself), but with those of three or four of 
 his own contemporaries. Even within his own 
 party, Lord Derby, Lord Ellenborough, and Lord 
 Cairns in their several ways surpassed him. There 
 is not one of his longer and more finished harangues 
 which can be read with interest from beofinnino- to 
 end. But there is hardly any among them which 
 does not contain some striking passage, some 
 image or epigram, or burst of sarcasm, which 
 must have been exceedingly effective when de- 
 livered. It is partly upon these isolated passages, 
 especially the sarcastic ones (though the witticisms 
 were sometimes borrowed), and still more upon 
 the aptness of the speech to the circumstances 
 under which it was made, that his parliamentary 
 fame rests. If he was not a great orator he was 
 a superb debater, who watched with the utmost 
 care the temper of the audience, and said just 
 what was needed at the moment to disconcert an 
 opponent or to put heart into his friends. His 
 repartees were often happy, and must sometimes 
 have been unpremeditated. As he had not the 
 ardent temperament of the born orator, so neither 
 had he the external advantages which count for 
 much before large assemblies. His voice was 
 not remarkable either for range or for quality. 
 His manner was somewhat stiff, his gestures few,
 
 48 Biographical Studies 
 
 his countenance inexpressive. Yet his delivery 
 was not wanting in skill, and often added point, 
 by its cool unconcern, to a stinging epigram. 
 
 What he lacked in eloquence he made up 
 for by tactical adroitness. No more consum- 
 mate parliamentary strategist has been seen in 
 England. He had studied the House of Commons 
 till he knew it as a player knows his instrument 
 studied it collectively, for it has a collective 
 character, and studied the men who compose 
 it : their worse rather than their better side, 
 their prejudices, their foibles, their vanities, 
 their ambitions, their jealousies, above all, that 
 curious corporate pride which they have, and 
 which makes them resent any approach to dicta- 
 tion. He could play on every one of these 
 strings, and yet so as to conceal his skill ; and he 
 so economised himself as to make them always 
 wish to hear him. He knew how in a body of 
 men obliged to listen to talk, and most of it 
 tedious talk, about matters in themselves mostly 
 uninteresting, the desire for a little amusement 
 becomes almost a passion ; and he humoured 
 this desire so far as occasionally to err by 
 excess of banter and flippancy. Almost always 
 respectful to the House, he had a happy 
 knack of appearing to follow rather than to 
 lead, and when he made an official statement 
 it was with the air of one who was taking 
 them into his confidence. Much of this he
 
 Lord Beaconsjfield 49 
 
 may have learned from observing Lord Palmer- 
 ston ; but the art came more naturally to that 
 statesman, who was an Englishman all through, 
 than to a man of Mr. Disraeli's origin, who 
 looked on Englishmen from outside, and never 
 felt himself, so to speak, responsible for their 
 habits or ideas. 
 
 As leader of his party in Opposition, he was 
 at once daring and cautious. He never feared 
 to give battle, even when he expected defeat, 
 if he deemed it necessary, with a view to the 
 future, that the judgment of his party should 
 have been pronounced in a formal way. On 
 the other hand, he was wary of committing him- 
 self to a policy of blind or obstinate resistance. 
 When he perceived that the time had come to 
 yield, he knew how to yield with a good grace, 
 so as both to support a character for reason- 
 ableness and to obtain valuable concessions as 
 the price of peace. If difficulties arose with 
 foreign countries he claimed full liberty of 
 criticising the conduct of the Ministry, but 
 ostentatiously abstained from obstructing or 
 thwarting their acts, declaring that England must 
 always present a united front to the foreigner, 
 whatever penalties she might afterwards visit 
 on those who had mismanaged her concerns. 
 As regards the inner discipline of his party, 
 he had enormous difficulties to surmount in the 
 jealousy which many Tories felt for him as a
 
 50 Biographical Studies 
 
 new man, a man whom they could not under- 
 stand and only partially trusted.^ Conspiracies 
 were repeatedly formed against him ; malcontents 
 attacked him in the press, and sometimes even in 
 Parliament. These he seldom noticed, maintain- 
 ing a cool and self-confident demeanour which 
 disheartened the plotters, and discharging the 
 duties of his post with steady assiduity. He 
 was always on the look-out for young men of 
 promise, drew them towards him, encouraged 
 them to help him in parliamentary sharp-shoot- 
 ing, and fostered in every way the spirit of party. 
 The bad side of that spirit was seen when he 
 came into office, for then every post in the 
 public service was bestowed either by mere 
 favouritism or on party grounds ; and men who 
 had been loyal to him were rewarded by places 
 or titles to which they had no other claim. 
 But the unity and martial fervour of the Tory 
 party was raised to the highest point. Nor was 
 Disraeli himself personally unpopular with his 
 parliamentary opponents, even when he was most 
 hotly attacked on the platform and in the press. 
 To know Encrland and watch the shifting 
 
 ' In the Life of Lord George Bentiuck (written shortly after Peel's 
 death), Disraeli, after dilating upon the loyalty which the Tory aristocracy 
 had displayed towards Peel, observes, "An aristocracy hesitates before it 
 yields its confidence, but it never does so grudgingly. ... In political 
 connections the social feeling mingles with the principle of honour which 
 governs gentlemen. . . . Such a following is usually cordial and faithful. 
 An aristocracy is rather apt to exaggerate the (jualities and magnify the 
 importance of a plebeian leader.""
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 5 i 
 
 currents of its opinion is a very different matter 
 from knowing the House of Commons. Indeed, 
 the two kinds of knowledge are in a measure 
 incompatible. Men who enter Parliament soon 
 beo-in to forfjet that it is not, in the last resort, 
 Parliament that governs, but the people. Ab- 
 sorbed in the daily contests of their Chamber, 
 they over-estimate the importance of those con- 
 tests. They come to think that Parliament is 
 in fact what it is in theory, a microcosm of 
 the nation, and that opinion inside is sure to 
 reflect the opinion outside. When they are in a 
 minority they are depressed ; when they are in 
 a majority they fancy that all is well, forgetting 
 their masters out-of-doors. This tendency is 
 aggravated by the fact that the English Parlia- 
 ment meets in the capital, where the rich and 
 luxurious congregate and give their tone to 
 society. The House of Commons, though many 
 of its members belong to the middle class by 
 origin, belongs practically to the upper class by 
 sympathy, and is prone to believe that what it 
 hears every evening at dinners or receptions is 
 what the country is thinking. A member of the 
 House of Commons is, therefore, ill-placed for 
 feeling the pulse of the nation, and in order to 
 do so must know what is being said over the 
 country, and must frequently visit or communi- 
 cate with his constituents. If this difficulty is 
 experienced by an ordinary private member, it
 
 52 Biographical Studies 
 
 is greater for a minister whose time is filled 
 by official duties, or for a leader of Opposition, 
 who has to be constantly thinking of his tactics 
 in the House. In Disraeli's case there was a 
 keenness of observation and discernment far 
 beyond the common. But he was under the dis- 
 advantages of not being really an Englishman, 
 and of having never lived among the people.^ 
 The detachment I have already referred to tended 
 to weaken his power of judging popular sentiment, 
 and' appraising at their true value the various 
 tendencies that sway and divide a nation so 
 complex as the English. Early in life he had 
 formed theories about the relations of the differ- 
 ent classes of English society nobility, gentry, 
 capitalists, workmen, peasantry, and the middle 
 classes theories which were far from containing 
 the whole truth ; and he adhered to them even 
 when the changes of half a century had made them 
 less true. He had a great aversion, not to say con- 
 tempt, for Puritanism, and for the Dissenters among 
 whom it chiefiy holds its ground, and pleased himself 
 with the notion that the extension of the suffrage 
 which he carried in 1867 had destroyed their 
 political power. The Conservative victory at the 
 election of 1874 confirmed him in this belief, and 
 made him also think that the working classes 
 were ready to follow the lead of the rich. He 
 
 1 When he did set himself to examine the condition of the people, the 
 diagnosis, if not always correct, was always suggestive, e.g. the account of 
 the manufacturing districts given in Sybil, or the Two Nations.
 
 Lord Beaconsheld 53 
 
 perceived that the Liberal ministry of 1868-74 
 had offended certain influential sections by appear- 
 ing too demiss or too unenterprising in foreign 
 affairs, and fancied that the bulk of the nation 
 would be dazzled by a warlike mien, and an 
 active, even aggressive, foreign policy. Such a 
 policy was congenial to his own ideas, and to 
 the society that surrounded him. It was ap- 
 plauded by some largely circulated newspapers 
 which had previously been unfriendly to the 
 Tory party. Thus he was more surprised than 
 any other man of similar experience to find the 
 nation sending up a larger majority against him 
 in 1880 than it had sent up for him in 1874. 
 This was the most striking instance of his mis- 
 calculation. But he had all through his career 
 an imperfect comprehension of the English 
 people. Individuals, or even an assembly, may 
 be understood by dint of close and long-continued 
 observation ; but to understand a whole nation, 
 one must also have sympathy, and this his circum- 
 stances, not less than his character, had denied him. 
 It was partly the same defect that prevented 
 him from mastering the general politics of Europe. 
 There is a sense in which no single man can 
 pretend to understand Europe. Bismarck him- 
 self did not. The problem is too vast, the facts 
 to be known too numerous, the undercurrents 
 too varying. One can speak only of more or 
 less. If Europe had been in his time what it
 
 54 Biographical Studies 
 
 was a century before, Disraeli would have had 
 a far better chance of being fit to become what 
 it was probably his dearest wish to become its 
 guide and arbiter. He would have taken the 
 measure of the princes and ministers with whom 
 he had to deal, would have seen and adroitly 
 played on their weaknesses. His novels show- 
 how often he had revolved diplomatic situations 
 in his mind, and reflected on the way of handling 
 them. Foreign diplomatists are agreed that at 
 the Congress of Berlin he played his part to 
 admiration, spoke seldom, but spoke always to 
 the point and with dignity, had a perfect concep- 
 tion of what he meant to secure, and of the 
 means he must employ to secure it, never haggled 
 over details or betrayed any eagerness to win 
 support, never wavered in his demands, even when 
 they seemed . to lead straight to war. Dealing 
 with individuals, who represented material forces 
 which he had gauged, he was perfectly at home, 
 and deserved the praise he obtained from Bis- 
 marck, who, comparing him with other eminent 
 figures at the Congress, is reported to have said, 
 bluntly but heartily, " Der alte Jude. das ist der 
 Mann."^ But to know what the condition of 
 South-Eastern Europe really was, and understand 
 how best to settle its 'troubles, was a far more diffi- 
 cult task, and Disraeli possessed neither the know- 
 ledge nor the insight required. In the Europe 
 
 ^ "The old Jew, that is the man."
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 5 5 
 
 of to-day, peoples count for more than the wills 
 of individual rulers : one must comprehend the 
 passions and sympathies of peoples if one is to 
 forecast the future. This he seldom cared to 
 do. He did not realise the part and the power 
 of moral forces. Down to the outbreak of the 
 American Civil War he maintained that the 
 question between the North and the South was 
 mainly a fiscal question between the Protectionist 
 interests of the one and the Free Trade interests 
 of the other. He always treated with contempt 
 the national movement in Italy. He made no 
 secret in the days before 1859 of his good-will 
 to Austria and of his liking for Louis Napoleon 
 a man inferior to him in ability and in courage, 
 but to whose character his own had some affinities. 
 In that elaborate study of Sir Robert Peel's char- 
 acter/ which is one of Disraeli's best literary per- 
 formances, he observes that Peel '' was destitute 
 of imagination, and wanting imagination he wanted 
 prescience." True it is that imagination is neces- 
 sary for prescience, but imagination is not enough 
 to give prescience. It may even be a snare. 
 
 Disraeli's imagination, his fondness for theories, 
 and disposition rather to cling to them than to 
 study and interpret facts, made him the victim 
 of his own preconceived ideas, as his indolence 
 deterred him from following the march of change 
 and noting how different things were in the 
 
 ^ Tn the Life of Lord (ieori^r'. n.-ntiuck.
 
 56 Biographical Studies 
 
 'seventies from what they had been in the 
 'thirties. Mr. Gladstone said to me in 1876, 
 " Disraeli's two leading ideas in foreign policy- 
 have always been the maintenance of the temporal 
 power of the Pope, and the maintenance of the 
 power of the Sultan." Unable to save the one, he 
 clung to the hope of saving the other. He was 
 possessed by the notion, seductive to a dreamy 
 mind, that all the disturbances of Europe arose 
 from the action of secret societies ; and when the 
 Eastern Question was in 1875 re-opened by the 
 insurrection in Herzegovina, followed by the 
 war of Servia against the Turks, he explained 
 the event in a famous speech by saying, " The 
 secret societies of Europe have declared war 
 against Turkey" the fact being that the societies 
 which in Russia were promoting the Servian war 
 were public societies, openly collecting subscrip- 
 tions, while those secret "social democratic" 
 societies of which we have since heard so much 
 were strongly opposed to the interference of 
 Russia, and those other secret societies in the 
 rest of Europe, wherein Poles and Italians have 
 played a leading part, were, if not hostile, at any 
 rate quite indifferent to the movement among the 
 Eastern Christians. 
 
 Against these errors there must be set several 
 cases in which he showed profound discernment. 
 In 1843 and 1844 he delivered, in debates on the 
 condition of Ireland, speeches which then con-
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 5 7 
 
 stituted and long remained the most penetrating 
 and concise diagnosis of the troubles of that country 
 ever addressed to Parliament. Ireland has, he 
 said, a starving peasantry, an alien church, and an 
 absentee aristocracy, and he went on to add that 
 the function of statesmanship was to cure by peace- 
 ful and constitutional methods ills which in other 
 countries had usually induced, and been removed 
 by, revolution. During the American Civil War of 
 1861-65, Disraeli was the only leading statesman 
 on his own side of politics who did not embrace and 
 applaud the cause of the South. Whether this 
 arose from a caution that would not commit itself 
 where it recognised ignorance, or from a percep- 
 tion of the superior strength of the Northern 
 States (a perception which whoever visits the 
 South even to-day is astonished that so few 
 people in Europe should have had), it is not easy 
 to decide ; but whatever the cause, the fact is an 
 evidence of his prudence or sagacity all the more 
 weighty because Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, 
 and Mr. Gladstone, as well as Lord Derby and 
 Sir Hugh Cairns, had each of them expressed 
 more or less sympathy with, or belief in, the 
 success of the Southern cause. 
 
 The most striking instance, however, of Dis- 
 raeli's insight was his perception that an exten- 
 sion of the suffrage would not necessarily injure, 
 and might end by strengthening, the Tory party. 
 The Act of 1867 ^vas described at the time as
 
 58 Biographical Studies 
 
 "a leap in the dark." But Disraeli's eyes had 
 pierced the darkness. For half a century poli- 
 ticians had assumed that the masses of the people 
 were and would remain under the Liberal banner. 
 Even as late as 1872 it was thought on Liberal 
 platforms a good joke to say of some opinion that 
 it might do for Conservative working men, if there 
 were any. Disraeli had, long before 1867, seen 
 deeper, and though his youthful fancies that the 
 monarchy might be revived as an effective force, 
 and that "the peasantry" would follow with 
 mediaeval reverence the lead of the landed gentry, 
 proved illusory, he was right in discerning that 
 wealth and social influence would in parliamentary 
 elections count for more among the masses than 
 the traditions of constitutional Whiggism or the 
 dogmas of abstract Radicalism. 
 
 In estimating his statesmanship as a whole, 
 one must give due weight to the fact that it 
 impressed many publicists abroad. No English 
 minister had for a long time past so fascinated 
 observers in Germany and Austria. Supposing 
 that under the long reign of Liberalism English- 
 men had ceased to care for foreign politics, they 
 looked on him as the man who had given back to 
 Britain her old European position, and attributed 
 to him a breadth of design, a grasp and a fore- 
 sight such as men had revered in Lord Chatham, 
 greatest in the short list of ministers who have 
 raised the fame of England abroad. I remember
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 59 
 
 seeing in a Conservative club, about 1880, a 
 large photograph of Lord Beaconsfield, wearing 
 the well-known look of mysterious fixity, under 
 which is inscribed the line of Homer : " He alone 
 is wise: the rest are fieeting shadows."^ It 
 was a happy idea to go for a motto to the 
 favourite poet of his rival, as it was an un- 
 happy chance to associate the wisdom ascribed 
 to Disraeli with his policy in the Turkish East 
 and in Afghanistan, a policy now universally ad- 
 mitted to have been unwise and unfortunate." 
 But whatever may be thought of the appropriate- 
 ness of the motto, the fact remains that this was 
 the belief he succeeded in inspiring. He did it 
 by virtue of those very gifts which sometimes 
 brought him into trouble his taste for large and 
 imposing theories, his power of clothing them in 
 vague and solemn language, his persistent faith in 
 them. He came, by long posing, to impose upon 
 himself and to believe in his own profundity. 
 Few people could judge whether his ideas of 
 imperial policy were sound and feasible ; but 
 every one saw that he had theories, and many 
 fell under the spell which a grandiose imagination 
 can exercise. It is chiefly this gift, coupled with 
 
 1 0'ii{j ireiri'vcrOat, Tol Si crKial diiTtrovcni' [Oif. x. 495). Uscil i)f Tirc^ias, 
 in tlie world of disembodied spirits. 
 
 - To defend Disraeli by arguing; that his policy had not a fair chance 
 because his colleagues did not allow him to carry it through is to admit 
 another error not less grave, for the path he took was one on which no 
 minister ought to have entered unless satistied that the Cabinet and the 
 country would let him follow it to the end.
 
 6o Biographical Studies 
 
 his indomitable tenacity, which lifts him out of 
 the line of mere party leaders. If he failed to see 
 how much the English are sometimes moved by 
 compassion, he did see that it may be worth while 
 to play to their imagination. 
 
 We may now ask again the question asked at 
 first : How did a man, whatever his natural gifts, 
 who was weighted in his course by such disadvan- 
 tages as Disraeli's, by his Jewish origin, by the 
 escapades of his early career, by the want of con- 
 fidence which his habitual cynicism inspired, by the 
 visionary nature of so many of his views, how did 
 he, in a conservative and aristocratic country like 
 England, triumph over so many prejudices and 
 enmities, and raise himself to be the head of the 
 Conservative and aristocratic party, the trusted 
 counsellor of the Crown, the ruler, almost the 
 dictator, of a free people ? 
 
 However high be the estimate formed of 
 Disraeli's gifts, secondary causes must have been 
 at work to enable him to overcome the obstacles 
 that blocked his path. The ancients were not 
 wrong in ascribing to Fortune a great share in 
 human affairs. Now, among the secondary causes 
 of success, that "general minister and leader set 
 over worldly splendours," as Dante calls her,^ 
 played no insignificant part. One of these causes 
 lay in the nature of the party to which he belonged. 
 The Tory party of the years between 1848 and 
 
 ' Inf. vii. 77.
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 6i 
 
 1865 contained a comparatively small number of 
 able men. When J. S. Mill once called it the 
 stupid party, it did not repudiate the name, but 
 pointed to its cohesion and its resolution as 
 showing how many things besides mere talent 
 go to make political greatness. A man of 
 shining gifts had within its ranks few com- 
 petitors ; and this was signally the case im- 
 mediately after Peel's defection. That statesman 
 had carried off with him the intellectual flower 
 of the Conservatives. Those who were left 
 behind to form the Protectionist Opposition in 
 the House of Commons were broad-acred squires, 
 of solid character but slender capacity. Through 
 this heavy atmosphere Mr. Disraeli rose like a 
 balloon. Being practically the only member of 
 his party in the Commons with either strategical 
 or debating power, he became indispensable, and 
 soon established a supremacy which years of 
 patient labour might not have given him in a 
 rivalry with the distinguished band who sur- 
 rounded Peel. During the twenty years that 
 followed the great Tory schism of 1846 no 
 man arose in the Tory ranks capable of dis- 
 puting his throne. The conspiracies hatched 
 against him might well have prospered could a 
 candidate for the leadership have been found 
 capable of crossing swords with the chieftain in 
 possession. Fortune, true to her nursling, suffered 
 none such to appear.
 
 62 Biographical Studies 
 
 Another favouring influence not understood 
 outside England was to be found in the character 
 of the party he led. In his day the Tories, being 
 the party of the property-holders, and having not 
 to advance but to stand still, not to propose 
 changes but to resist them, having bonds of 
 interest as well as of sentiment to draw them 
 close together, possessed a cohesion, a loyalty 
 to their chiefs, a tenacious corporate spirit, far 
 exceeding what was to be found among their 
 adversaries, who were usually divided into a 
 moderate or Whig and an advanced or Radical 
 section. He who established himself as the Tory 
 leader was presently followed by the rank and file 
 with a devotion, an unquestioning submission and 
 confidence, which placed his character and doctrines 
 under the segis of the party, and enforced loyalty 
 upon parliamentary malcontents. This corporate 
 spirit was of infinite value to Disraeli. The 
 historical past of the great Tory party, its associa- 
 tions, the social consideration which it enjoys, all 
 went to ennoble his position and efface the remem- 
 brance of the less creditable parts of his career. 
 And in the later days of his reign, when no one 
 disputed his supremacy, every Tory was, as a 
 matter of course, his advocate and admirer, and 
 resented assaults on him as insults to the party. 
 When a man excites hatred by his words or deeds, 
 attacks on his character are an inevitable relief to 
 overcharged feelings. Technically regarded, they
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 63 
 
 are not good politics. Misrepresentation some- 
 times succeeds ; vituperation seldom. Let a man 
 be personally untrustworthy or dangerous, still, it 
 is only his own words that damage him, at least in 
 England and America. Even his own words, how- 
 ever discrediting, even his acts, however culpable, 
 may, if they belong to a past unfamiliar to the voter 
 of to-day, tell little, perhaps too little, on the voter's 
 mind when they are brought up against him. The 
 average citizen has a short memory, and thinks 
 that the dead may be allowed to bury their dead. 
 
 Let it be further noted that Disraeli's career 
 coincided with a significant change in English 
 politics, a change partly in the temper of the nation, 
 partly in the balance of voting power. For thirty 
 years after the Reform Act of 1832, not only had 
 the middle classes constituted the majority of 
 the electors, but the social influence of the great 
 Whig families and the intellectual influence of 
 the economic school of Cobden had been potent 
 factors. These forces were, in the later part of 
 Disraeli's life, tending to decline. The working- 
 class vote was vastly increased in 1867. The 
 old Whig light gradually paled, and many of the 
 Whig magnates, obeying class sympathies rather 
 than party traditions, drifted slowly into Toryism. 
 A generation arose which had not seen the Free 
 Trade struggle, or had forgotten the Free Trade 
 arguments, and which was attracted by ideals other 
 than those which Cobden had preached. The
 
 64 Biographical Studies 
 
 grievances which had made men reformers had 
 been largely removed. The battle of liberty and 
 nationality in Continental Europe had been in 
 the main won, and Englishmen had lost the 
 enthusiasm for freedom which had fired them in 
 the days when the memory of their own struggle 
 against the Crown and the oligarchy was still 
 fresh. With none of these changes had Disraeli's 
 personal action much to do, but they all enured 
 to the benefit of his party, they all swelled the 
 tide which bore him into office in 1874. 
 
 Finally, he had the great advantage of living 
 long. Many a statesman has died at fifty, 
 and passed from the world's memory, who might 
 have become a figure in history with twenty years 
 more of life. Had Disraeli's career closed in 
 1854, he would have been remembered as a 
 parliamentary gladiator, who had produced a few 
 incisive speeches, a crude Budget, and some 
 brilliant social and political sketches. The 
 stronger parts of his character might have re- 
 mained unknown. True it is that a man must 
 have greatness in order to stand the test of long 
 life. Some are found out, like Louis Napoleon. 
 Some lose their balance and therewith their 
 influence, like Lord Brougham. Some cease to 
 grow or learn, and if a statesman is not better 
 at sixty than he was at thirty, he is worse. 
 Some jog heavily on, like Metternich, or stiffen 
 into arbitrary doctrinaires, like Guizot. Disraeli
 
 Lord Beaconslield 65 
 
 did not merely stand the test, he gained im- 
 mensely by it. He gained by rising into a 
 position where his strength could show itself. 
 He gained also by so impressing his individuality 
 upon people as to make them accept it as an 
 ultimate fact, till at length they came, not so much 
 to blame him for what he did in accord with his 
 established reputation, as rather to relish and 
 enter into the humour of his character. As they 
 unconsciously took to judging him by a standard 
 different from that which they applied to ordinary 
 Englishmen, they hardly complained of deflections 
 from veracity which would have seemed grave 
 in other persons. He had given notice that 
 he was not like other men, that his words must 
 not be taken in their natural sense, that he was 
 to be regarded as the skilful player of a great 
 game, the consummate actor in a great part. 
 And, once more, he gained by the many years 
 during which he had opportunities of displaying 
 his fortitude, patience, constancy under defeat, 
 unwavering self-confidence gifts rarer than mere 
 intellectual power, gifts that deserve the influence 
 they bestow. Nothing so fascinates mankind as 
 to see a man equal to every fortune, unshaken 
 by reverses, indifferent to personal abuse, main- 
 taining a long combat against apparently hopeless 
 odds with the sharpest weapons and a smiling 
 face. His followers fancy he must have hidden 
 resources of wisdom as well as of courage. When
 
 66 Biographical Studies 
 
 some of his predictions come true, and the 
 turning tide of popular feeling begins to bear 
 them toward power, they believe that he has 
 been all along right and the rest of the world 
 wrong. When victory at last settles on his crest, 
 even his enemies can hardly help applauding a 
 reward which seems so amply earned. It was 
 by this quality, more perhaps than by anything 
 else, by this serene surface with fathomless depths 
 below, that he laid his spell upon the imagination 
 of observers in Continental Europe, and received 
 at his death a sort of canonisation from a large 
 section of the English people. 
 
 What will posterity think of him, and by 
 what will he be remembered ? The glamour has 
 already passed away, and to few of those who on 
 the 19th of April deck his statue with flowers 
 is he more than a name. 
 
 Parliamentary fame is fleeting : the memory of 
 parliamentary conflicts soon grows dim and dull. 
 Posterity fixes a man's place in history by asking 
 not how many tongues buzzed about him in his 
 lifetime, but how great a factor he was in the 
 changes of the world, that is, how far different 
 things would have been twenty or fifty years 
 after his death if he had never lived. Tried by 
 this standard, the results upon the course of events 
 of Disraeli's personal action are not numerous, 
 though some of them may be deemed momentous. 
 He was an adroit parliamentary tactician who
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 67 
 
 held his followers together through a difficult 
 time. By helping to keep the Peelites from 
 rejoining their old party, he gave that party a 
 colour different from the sober hues which it 
 had worn during the leadership of Peel. He 
 became the founder of what has in later days 
 been called Tory democracy, winning over a 
 large section of the humbler classes to the 
 banner under which the majority of the wealthy 
 and the holders of vested interests already stood 
 arrayed. He saved for the Turkish Empire 
 a part of its territories, yet in doing so merely 
 prolonged for a little the death agony of 
 Turkish power. Though it cannot be said 
 that he conferred any benefit on India or the 
 Colonies, he certainly stimulated the imperial 
 instincts of Englishmen. He had occasional 
 flashes of insight, as when in 1843 he perceived 
 exactly what Ireland needed, and at least one 
 brilliant flash of foresight when he predicted that 
 a wide extension of the suffrage would bring no 
 evil to the Tory party. Yet in the case of 
 Ireland he did nothing, when the chance came 
 to him, to give effect to the judgment which he 
 had formed, while in the case of the suffrage he 
 did but follow up and carry into effect an impulse 
 given by others. The Franchise Act of 1867 is 
 perhaps the only part of his policy which has, 
 by hastening a change that induced other changes, 
 permanently affected the course of events ; and
 
 68 Biographical Studies 
 
 it remains the chief monument of his parlia- 
 mentary skill. There was nothing in his career to 
 set the example of a lofty soul or a noble purpose. 
 He did not raise, he may even have lowered, 
 the tone of English public life. 
 
 Yet history will not leave him without a meed 
 of admiration. When all possible explanations of 
 his success have been given, what a wonderful 
 career ! An adventurer foreign in race, in 
 ideas, in temper, without money or family 
 connections, climbs, by patient and unaided 
 efforts, to lead a great party, master a powerful 
 aristocracy, sway a vast empire, and make him- 
 self one of the four or five greatest personal 
 forces in the world. His head is not turned by 
 his elevation. He never becomes a demagogue ; 
 he never stoops to beguile the multitude by 
 appealing to sordid instincts. He retains through 
 life a certain amplitude of view, a due sense of 
 the dignity of his position, a due regard for the 
 traditions of the ancient assembly which he leads, 
 and when at last the destinies of England fall 
 into his hands, he feels the grandeur of the 
 charge, and seeks to secure what he believes to 
 be her imperial place in the world. What- 
 ever judgment history may ultimately pass upon 
 him, she will find in the long annals of the 
 English Parliament no more striking figure.
 
 DEAN STANLEY^ 
 
 I N the England of his time there was no personality- 
 more attractive, nor any more characteristic of 
 the country, than Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean 
 of Westminster. England is the only European 
 country in which such a figure could have appeared, 
 for it is the only country in which a man may hold 
 a high ecclesiastical post and yet be regarded 
 by the nation, not specially as an ecclesiastic, but 
 rather as a distinguished writer, an active and 
 influential man of affairs, an ornament of social 
 life. But if in this respect he was typical of his 
 country, he was in other respects unique. He 
 was a clergyman untouched by clericalism, a 
 courtier unspoiled by courts. No one could 
 point to any one else in England who occupied 
 a similar position, nor has any one since arisen 
 who recalls him, or who fills the place which his 
 departure left empty. 
 
 Stanley was born in 1815. His father, then 
 Rector of Alderley, in Cheshire, afterwards Bishop 
 
 1 A Life of Dean Stanley, in two vf)lumes, ljt;i;un by Theodore 
 Walrond, continued by Dean I'.radley, und comitleted by Mr. K. E. 
 Trothero, appeared in 1893. 
 
 69
 
 70 Biographical Studies 
 
 of Norwich, belonged to the family of the Stanleys 
 of Alderley, a branch of that ancient and famous 
 line the head of which is Earl of Derby. His 
 mother, Catherine Leycester, was a woman of 
 much force of character and intellectual power. 
 He was educated at Rugby School under Dr. 
 Arnold, the influence of whose ideas remained 
 great over him all through his life, and at 
 Oxford, where he became a fellow and tutor 
 of University College. Passing thence to be 
 Canon of Canterbury, he returned to the Uni- 
 versity as Professor of Ecclesiastical History, 
 and remained there for seven years. In 1863 
 he was appointed Dean of Westminster, and at 
 the same time married Lady Augusta Bruce 
 (sister of the then Lord Elgin, Governor-General 
 first of Canada and afterwards of India). He 
 died in 1881. 
 
 He held an extraordinarily active and busy life, 
 so intertwined with the history of the University of 
 Oxford and the history of the Church of England 
 from 1 850 to 1 880, that one can hardly think of any 
 salient point in either without thinking also of 
 him. Yet it was perhaps rather in the intensity 
 of his nature and the nobility of his sentiments 
 than in either the compass or the strength of his 
 intellectual faculties that the charm and the force 
 he exercised lay. In some directions he was 
 curiously deficient. He had no turn for abstract 
 reasoning, no liking for metaphysics or any other
 
 Dean Stanley 7 1 
 
 form of speculation. He was equally unfitted 
 for scientific inquiry, and could scarcely work 
 a sum in arithmetic. Indeed, in no held was 
 he a logical or systematic thinker. Neither, 
 although he had a retentive memory, and 
 possessed a great deal of various knowledge on 
 many subjects, could he be called learned, for 
 he had not really mastered any branch of history, 
 and was often inaccurate in details. He had never 
 been trained to observe facts in natural history. 
 He had absolutely no ear for music, and very 
 little perception either of colour or of scent. He 
 learned foreign languages with difficulty and never 
 spoke them well. He was so short-sighted as to 
 be unable to recognise a face passing close in the 
 street. Yet with these shortcomings he was a 
 born traveller, went everywhere, saw everything 
 and everybody worth seeing, always seized on 
 the most characteristic features of a landscape, or 
 building, or a person, and described them with a 
 freshness which made one feel ss if they had 
 never been described before. Of the hundreds 
 who have published books on the Desert of 
 Sinai and the Holy Land, many of them skilful 
 writers or men of profound knowledge, he is 
 the only one who is still read and likely to con- 
 tinue to be read, so vivid in colour, so exquisite 
 in feeling, are the pictures he has given. Nature- 
 alone, however, nature taken by herself, did not 
 satisfy him, did not, indeed, in his later days (for
 
 72 Biographical Studies 
 
 in his boyhood he had been a passionate lover of 
 the mountains) greatly interest him. A building 
 or a landscape had power to rouse his imagina- 
 tion and call forth his unrivalled powers of de- 
 scription only when it was associated with the 
 thoughts and deeds of men. 
 
 The largest part of his literary work was done 
 in the field of ecclesiastical history, a subject 
 naturally congenial to him, and to which he was 
 further drawn by the professorship which he held 
 at Oxford during a time when a great revival of 
 historical studies was in progress. It was work 
 which critics could easily disparage, for there were 
 many small errors scattered through it ; and the 
 picturesque method of treatment he employed 
 was apt to pass into scrappiness. He fixed on 
 the points which had a special interest for his 
 own mind as illustrating some trait of personal 
 or national character, or some moral lesson, and 
 passed hastily over other matters of equal or 
 greater importance. Nevertheless his work 
 had some distinctive merits which have not re- 
 ceived from professional critics the whole credit 
 they deserved. In all that Stanley wrote one 
 finds a certain largeness and dignity of view. 
 He had a sense of the unity of history, of the 
 constant relation of past and present, of the simi- 
 larity of human nature in one age and country to 
 human nature in another ; and he never failed to 
 dwell upon the permanently valuable truths which
 
 Dean Stanley 73 
 
 history has to teach. Nothing was too small to 
 attract him, because he discovered a meaning in 
 everything, and he was therefore never dull, 
 for even when he moralised he would light up 
 his reflections by some happy anecdote. With 
 this he possessed a keen eye, the eye of a 
 poet, for human character, and a power of 
 sympathy that enabled him to appreciate even 
 those whose principles and policy he disliked. 
 Herein he was not singular, for the sympathetic 
 style of writing history has become fashionable 
 among us. What was remarkable in him was 
 that his sympathy did not betray him into the 
 error, now also fashionable, of extenuating moral 
 distinctions. His charity never blunted the edge 
 of his justice, nor prevented him from reprobating 
 the faults of the personages who had touched his 
 heart. For one sin only he had little historical 
 tolerance the sin of intolerance. So there was 
 one sin only which ever led him to speak severely 
 of any of his contemporaries- the sin of untruth- 
 fulness. Being himself so simple and straight- 
 forward as to feel his inability to cope with 
 deceitful men, deceit incensed him. But he did not 
 resent the violence of his adversaries, for though 
 he suffered much at their hands he knew many 
 of them to be earnest, unselfish, and conscientious 
 men. 
 
 His pictures of historical scenes are ad- 
 mirable, for with his interest in the study of
 
 74 Biographical Studies 
 
 character there went a large measure of dramatic 
 power. Nothing can be better in its way 
 than the description of the murder of St. 
 Thomas of Canterbury given in the Memorials 
 of Canterbury, which, after Sinai and Pales- 
 tine and the Life of Arnold, may be deemed 
 the best of Stanley's books. Whether he 
 could, with more leisure for careful thought 
 and study, have become a great historian, was 
 a question which those of us who were dazzled 
 by his Public Lectures at Oxford used often 
 to discuss. The leisure never came, for he 
 was throughout life warmly interested in every 
 current ecclesiastical question, and ready to 
 bear a part in discussing it, either in the 
 press for he wrote in the Edinburgh Review, 
 and often sent letters to the Times under 
 the signature of " Anglicanus " or in Convoca- 
 tion, where he had a seat during the latter 
 part of his career. These interruptions not 
 only checked the progress of his studies, but 
 gave to his compositions an air of haste, which 
 made them seem to want system and finish. The 
 habit of rapid writing for magazines or other 
 ephemeral purposes is alleged to tell injuriously 
 upon literary men : it told the more upon Stanley 
 because he was also compelled to produce sermons 
 rapidly. Now sermon-writing, while it breeds a 
 tendency to the making of rhetorical points, sub- 
 ordinates the habit of dispassionate inquiry to the
 
 Dean Stanley 75 
 
 enforcement of a moral lesson, Stanley, who 
 had a touch of the rhetorical temperament, and 
 was always eager to improve an occasion, certainly 
 suffered in this way. When he brings out a general 
 truth he is not content with it as a truth, but 
 seeks to turn it also to edification, or to make 
 it illustrate and support some view for which he 
 is contending at the time. When he is simply 
 describing, he describes rather as a dramatic artist 
 working for effect than as a historian solely 
 anxious to represent men and events as they 
 were. Yet if we consider how much a historian 
 gains, not only from an intimate knowledge of 
 his own time, but also, and even more 
 largely, from playing an active part in the 
 events of his own time, from swaying opinion by 
 his writings and his speeches, from sitting in 
 assemblies and organising schemes of attack and 
 defence, we may hesitate to wish that Stanley's 
 time had been more exclusively given to quiet 
 investigation. The freshness of his historical 
 portraits is notably due to the sense he carried 
 about with him of moving in history and being 
 a part of it. He never mounted his pulpit 
 in the Abbey or walked into the Jerusalem 
 Chamber when Convocation was sitting without 
 feeling that he was about to do something which 
 might possibly be recorded in the annals of his 
 country. I remember his mentioning, to illustrate 
 undergraduate ignorance, that once when he was
 
 76 Biographical Studies 
 
 going to give a lecture to his class, he suddenly- 
 recollected that Mr. Goldwin Smith, then Regius 
 Professor of Modern History, was announced to 
 deliver a public lecture at the same hour. Telling 
 the class that they would be better employed in 
 hearing Mr. Goldwin Smith than himself, he led 
 them all there. The next time the class met, 
 one of them, after making some acute comments 
 on the lecture, asked who the lecturer was. " I 
 was amazed," said Stanley, "that an intelligent 
 man should ask such a question, and then it 
 occurred to me that probably he did not know 
 who I was either," There was nothing of per- 
 sonal vanity or self-importance in this. All the 
 men of mark among whom he moved were to him 
 historical personages, and he would describe to 
 his friends some doing or saying of a contempo- 
 rary statesman or ecclesiastic with the same 
 eagerness, the same sense of its being a fact to 
 be noted and remembered, as the rest of us feel 
 about a personal anecdote relating to Oliver 
 Cromwell or Cardinal Richelieu. 
 
 His sermons, like nearly all good sermons, will 
 be inadequately appreciated by those who now 
 peruse them, not only because they were composed 
 for a given audience with special reference to the 
 circumstances of the time, but also because the 
 best of them gained so much by his impassioned 
 delivery, l^hey were all read from manuscript, and 
 his handwriting was so illegible that it was a marvel
 
 Dean Stanley 77 
 
 how he contrived to read them. I once asked 
 him, not long after he had been promoted to the 
 Deanery of Westminster, whether he found it 
 easy to make himself heard in the enormous nave 
 of the Abbey church. His frame, it ought to 
 be stated, was spare as well as small, and his 
 voice not powerful. He answered: "That de- 
 pends on whether I am interested in what I 
 am saying. If the sermon is on something 
 which interests me deeply I can fill the nave ; 
 otherwise I cannot." When he had got a worthy 
 theme, or one which stimulated his own emotions, 
 the power of his voice and manner was wonder- 
 ful. His tiny body seemed to swell, his chest 
 vibrated as he launched forth glowing words. 
 The farewell sermon he delivered when quitting 
 Oxford for Westminster lives in the memory of 
 those who heard it as a performance of extra- 
 ordinary power, the power springing froni the 
 intensity of his own feeling. No sermon has 
 ever since so moved the University. 
 
 He was by nature shy and almost timid, and he 
 was not supposed to possess any gift for extempore 
 speaking. But when in his later days he found 
 himself an almost solitary champion in Convoca- 
 tion of the principles of universal toleration and 
 comprehension which he held, he developed a de- 
 bating power which surprised himself as well as 
 his friends. It was to him a matter of honour and 
 conscience to defend his principles, and to defend
 
 78 Biographical Studies 
 
 them all the more zealously because he stood 
 alone on their behalf in a hostile assembly. His 
 courage was equal to the occasion, and his faculties 
 responded to the call his courage made. 
 
 In civil politics he was all his life a Liberal, be- 
 longing by birth to the Whig aristocracy, and dis- 
 posed on most matters to take rather the Whiggish 
 than the Radical view, yet drawn by the warmth 
 of his sympathy towards the working classes, 
 and popular with them. One of his chief 
 pleasures was to lead parties of humble visitors 
 round the Abbey on public holidays. Like most 
 members of the Whig families, he had no great 
 liking for Mr. Gladstone, not so much, perhaps, 
 on political grounds as because he distrusted the 
 Hioh Churchism and anti-Erastianism of the 
 Liberal leader. However, he never took any 
 active part in general politics, reserving his 
 strength for those ecclesiastical questions which 
 seemed to lie within his peculiar province.^ 
 Here he had two leading ideas : one, that the 
 Church of England must at all hazards continue 
 to be an Established Church, in alliance with, or 
 subjection to, the State (for his Erastianism was 
 unqualified), and recognising the Crown as her 
 head ; the other, that she must be a compre- 
 
 1 When J. S. Mill was a candidate for Westminster in 1868, Stanley 
 published a letter announcing his support, partly out of personal respect 
 for Mill, partly because it gave him an opportunity of expressing an 
 opinion on the Irish Church question, and of reprobating the charge of 
 atheism which had been brought against Mill.
 
 Dean Stanley 79 
 
 hensive Church, finding room in her bosom for 
 every sort or description of Christian, however 
 much or Httle he beheved of the dogmas con- 
 tained in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Prayer- 
 Book, to which she is bound by statute. The 
 former view cut him off from the Nonconformists 
 and the Radicals ; the latter exposed him to the fire 
 not only of those who, like the High Churchmen 
 and the Evangelicals, attach the utmost import- 
 ance to these dogmas, but of those also among 
 the laity who hold that a man ought under no 
 circumstances to sign any test or use any form of 
 prayer which does not express his own convictions. 
 Stanley would, of course, have greatly preferred 
 that the laws which regulate the Church of Eng- 
 land should be so relaxed as to require little or 
 no assent to any doctrinal propositions from her 
 ministers. He strove for this ; and he continued 
 to hope that this might be ultimately won. But 
 he conceived that in the meantime it was a less 
 evil that men should be technically bound by 
 subscriptions they objected to than that the 
 National Church should be narrowed by the 
 exclusion of those whose belief fell short of her 
 dogmatic standards. It was remarkable that 
 not only did he maintain this unpopular view of 
 his with unshaken courage on every occasion, 
 pleading the cause of every supposed heretic 
 against hostile majorities with a complete forget- 
 fulness of his own peace and ease, but that no
 
 8o Biographical Studies 
 
 one ever thought of attributing the course he 
 took to any selfish or sinister motive. It was 
 generally believed that his own opinions were 
 what nine-tenths of the Church of England would 
 call unorthodox. But the honesty and upright- 
 ness of his character were so patent that nobody 
 supposed that this fact made any difference, or 
 that it was for the sake of keeping his own place 
 that he fought the cause of others. 
 
 What his theological opinions were it might 
 have puzzled Stanley himself to explain. His 
 mind was not fitted to grasp abstract propo- 
 sitions. His historical imagination and his early 
 associations attached him to the doctrines of the 
 Nicene Creed ; but when he came to talk of 
 Christianity, he laid so much more stress on 
 its ethics than on its dogmatic side that his 
 clerical antagonists thought he held no creed at 
 all. Dr. Pusey would have said of Stanley what 
 he once said of Maurice, " He and I do not 
 worship the same God." The point of difference 
 between him and them was not so much that he 
 consciously disbelieved the dogmas they held 
 probably he did not as that he did not, like them, 
 think that true religion and final salvation depended 
 on believing them. And the weak point in his 
 imagination was that he seemed never to under- 
 stand their position, nor to realise how sacred and 
 how momentous to them were statements which 
 he saw in a purely imaginative light. He never
 
 Dean Stanley 8 1 
 
 could be got to see that a Church without any 
 dogmas would not be a Church at all in the sense 
 either of mankind in the past or of mankind in 
 the present. An anecdote was current that once 
 when he had in Disraeli's presence been descant- 
 ing on the harm done by the enforcement of dog- 
 matic standards, Disraeli had observed, "But pray 
 remember, Mr. Dean, no dogma, no Dean." 
 
 Those who thought him a heathen would have 
 assailed him less bitterly if he had been content 
 to admit his own differences from them. What 
 most incensed them was his habit of assuming 
 that, except in mere forms of expression, there 
 were really no differences at all, and that they 
 also held Christianity to consist not in any body 
 of doctrines, but in reverence for God and purity 
 of life. They would have preferred heathenism 
 itself to this kind of Universalism. 
 
 As ecclesiastical preferment had not discoloured 
 the native hue of his simplicity, so neither did the 
 influences of royal favour. It says little for 
 human nature that few people should be proof 
 against what the philosopher deems the trivial 
 and fleeting fascinations of a court. Stanley's 
 elevation of mind was proof. Intensely interested 
 in the knowledge of events passing behind the 
 scenes which his relations with the reigning family 
 opened to him, he scarcely ever referred to those 
 relations, and seemed neither to be affected 
 thereby, nor to care a whit more for the pomps
 
 82 Biographical Studies 
 
 and vanities of power or wealth, a whit less for 
 the friends and the causes he had learned to value 
 in his youth. 
 
 In private, that which most struck one in his 
 intellect was the quick eagerness with which his 
 imagination fastened upon any new fact, caught 
 its bearings, and clothed it with colour. His 
 curiosity remained inexhaustible. His delight in 
 visiting a new country was like that of an 
 American scholar landing for the first time in 
 Europe. A friend met him a year before his 
 death at a hotel in the North of England, 
 and found he was going to the Isle of Man. 
 He had mastered its geography and history, 
 and talked about it and what he was to 
 explore there as one might talk of Rome or 
 Athens when visiting them for the first tim.e. 
 When anybody told him an anecdote his sus- 
 ceptible imagination seized upon points which the 
 narrator had scarcely noticed, and discovered a 
 whole group of curious analogies from other times 
 or countries. Whatever you planted in this fertile 
 soil struck root and sprouted at once. Morally, 
 he impressed those who knew him not only by 
 his kindness of heart, but by a remarkable 
 purity and nobleness of aim. Nothing mean or 
 small or selfish seemed to harbour in his mind. 
 You might think him right or wrong, but you 
 never doubted that he was striving after the 
 truth. He was not merely a just man ; he
 
 Dean Stanley 83 
 
 loved justice with passion. It was partly, per- 
 haps, because justice, goodness, honour, charity, 
 seemed to him of such paramount importance in 
 life that he made little of doctrinal differences, 
 having perceived that these virtues may exist, and 
 may also be found wanting-, in every form of 
 religious creed or philosophical profession. When 
 the Convocation of the Anglican Church met at 
 Westminster, it was during many years his habit 
 to invite a great number of its leading members to 
 the deanery, the very men who had been attack- 
 ing him most hotly in debate, and who would 
 go on denouncing his latitudinarianism till Con- 
 vocation met again. They yielded sometimes 
 reluctantly, but still they yielded to the kind- 
 liness of his nature and the charm of his 
 manner. He used to dart about among them, 
 introducing opponents to one another, as indeed 
 on all occasions he delighted to bring the most 
 diverse people together, so that some one said 
 the company you met at the deanery were either 
 statesmen and duchesses or starving curates and 
 briefless barristers. 
 
 He had on the whole a happy life. It is 
 true that the intensity of his attachments exposed 
 him to correspondingly intense grief when he 
 lost those who were dearest to him ; true also 
 that, being by temperament a man of peace, he 
 was during the latter half of his life almost con- 
 stantly at war. But his home, first in the lifetime
 
 84 Biographical Studies 
 
 of his mother and then in that of his wife, had 
 a serene and unclouded brightness ; and the care 
 of the Abbey, rich with the associations of nearly 
 a thousand years of history, provided a function 
 which exactly suited him and which constituted 
 a never-failing source of enjoyment. To dwell in 
 the centre of the life of the Church of England, 
 and to dwell close to the Houses of Parliament, 
 in the midst of the making of history, knowing 
 and seeing those who were principally concerned 
 in making it, was in itself a pleasure to his 
 quenchless historical curiosity. His cheerfulness 
 and animation, although to some extent revived 
 by his visit to America and the reception he met 
 with there, were never the same after his wife's 
 death in 1876. But the sweetness of his dis- 
 position and his affection for his friends knew 
 no diminution. He remembered everything that 
 concerned them ; was always ready with sym- 
 pathy in sorrow or joy ; and gave to all alike, 
 high or low, famous or unknown, the same im- 
 pression, that his friendship was for themselves, 
 and not for any gifts or rank or other worldly 
 advantage they might enjoy. The art of friend- 
 ship is the greatest art in life. To enjoy his was 
 to be educated in that art.
 
 THOMAS HILL GREEN 
 
 The name of Thomas Green, Professor of Moral 
 Philosophy in the University of Oxford, was not, 
 during his lifetime, widely known outside the 
 University itself. But he is still remembered by 
 students of metaphysics and ethics as one of the 
 most vigorous thinkers of his time ; and his per- 
 sonality was a striking one, which made a deep 
 and lasting impression on those with whom he 
 came in contact. 
 
 He was born in Yorkshire in 1836, the son 
 of a country clergyman ; was educated at Rugby 
 School and at Balliol College, Oxford, of which 
 he became a fellow in i860, and a tutor in 1869. 
 In 1867 he was an unsuccessful candidate for a 
 chair of philosophy at St. Andrews, and in 1878 
 was elected Professor of Moral Philosophy in his 
 own University, which he never thereafter quitted. 
 He was married in 1869 and died in 1882. It 
 was a life externally uneventful, but full of 
 thought and work, and latterly crowned by great 
 influence over the younger and great respect from 
 the senior members of the University. 
 
 I can best describe Green as he was in his 
 85
 
 86 Biographical Studies 
 
 undergraduate days, for it was then that I saw 
 most of him. His appearance was striking, 
 and made him a famihar figure even to those 
 who did not know him personally. Thick 
 black hair, a sallow complexion, dark eyebrows, 
 deep -set eyes of rich brown with a peculiarly 
 steadfast look, were the features which first 
 struck one ; and with these there was a re- 
 markable seriousness of expression, an air of 
 solidity and quiet strength. He knew compara- 
 tively few people, and of these only a very few 
 intimately, having no taste or turn for those 
 sports in which university acquaintances are most 
 frequently made, and seldom appearing at break- 
 fast or wine parties. This caused him to pass 
 for harsh or unsocial ; and I remember having 
 felt a slight sense of alarm the first time I found 
 myself seated beside him. Though we belonged 
 to different colleges I had heard a great deal 
 about him, for Oxford undergraduates are warmly 
 interested in one another, and at the time I am 
 recalling they had an inordinate fondness for 
 measuring the intellectual gifts and conjecturing 
 the future of those among their contemporaries 
 who seemed likely to attain eminence. 
 
 Those who came to know Green intimately, 
 soon perceived that under his reserve there 
 lay not only a capacity for affection no 
 man was more tenacious in his friendships 
 but qualities that made him an attractive com-
 
 T. H. Green 87 
 
 panion. His tendency to solitude sprang less 
 from pride or coldness, than from the occupation 
 of his mind by subjects which seldom weigh on 
 men of his age. He had, even when a boy 
 at school (where he lived much by himself, but 
 exercised considerable moral influence), been 
 grappling with the problems of metaphysics and 
 theology, and they had given a tinge of gravity 
 to his manner. The relief to that gravity lay in 
 his humour, which was not only abundant but 
 genial and sympathetic. It used to remind us 
 of Carlyle he had both the sense of humour 
 and an underlying Puritanism in common with 
 Carlyle, one of the authors who (with Milton 
 and Wordsworth) had most influenced him 
 but in Green the Puritan tinge was more kindly, 
 and, above all, more lenient to ordinary people. 
 While averse, perhaps too severely averse, to 
 whatever was luxurious or frivolous in under- 
 graduate life, he had the warmest interest in, and 
 the strongest sympathy for, the humbler classes. 
 Loving social equality, and filled with a sense of 
 the dignity of simple human nature, he liked to 
 meet farmers and tradespeople on their own level, 
 and knew how to do so without seeming to con- 
 descend ; indeed nothing pleased him better than 
 when they addressed him as one of themselves, 
 the manner of his talk to them, as well as the 
 extreme plainness of his dress, conducing to such 
 mistakes. The belief in the duty of approaching
 
 88 Biographical Studies 
 
 the people directly and getting them to think and 
 to form and express their own views in their own 
 way was at the root of all his political doctrines. 
 
 Though apt to be silent in general com- 
 pany, no one could be more agreeable when 
 you were alone with him. We used to say 
 of him and his seniors said the same that 
 one never talked to him without carrying 
 away something to ponder over. On every- 
 thing he said or wrote there was stamped the 
 impress of a strong individuality, a mind that 
 thought for itself, a character ruggedly original, 
 wherein grimness was mingled with humour, and 
 practical shrewdness with a love for abstract 
 speculation. His independence appeared even in 
 the way he pursued his studies. AVith abilities of 
 the highest order, he cared comparatively little 
 for the distinctions which the University offers ; 
 choosing rather to follow out his own line of 
 reading in the way he judged permanently useful 
 than to devote himself to the pursuit of honours 
 and prizes. 
 
 He was constitutionally lethargic, found it hard 
 to rouse himself to exertion, and was apt to let 
 himself be driven to the last moment in finishing 
 a piece of work. There was a rule in his College 
 that an essay should be given in every Friday 
 evening. His was, to the great annoyance of 
 the dons, never ready till Saturday. But when 
 it did go in, it was the weightiest and most
 
 T. H. Green 89 
 
 thoughtful, as well as the most eloquent, that the 
 College produced. This indolence had one good 
 result. It disposed him to brood over subjects, 
 while others were running quickly through many 
 books and getting up subjects for examination. 
 It contributed to that depth and systematic 
 quality which struck us in his thinking, and 
 made him seem mature beside even the ablest 
 of his contemporaries. When others were 
 being, so to speak, blown hither and thither, 
 picking up and fascinated by new ideas, which 
 they did not know how to fit in with their old 
 ones, he seemed to have already formed for him- 
 self, at least in outline, a scheme of philosophy and 
 life coherent and complete. There was nothing 
 random or scattered in his ideas ; his mind, like 
 his style of writing, which ran into long and com- 
 plicated sentences, had a singular connectedness. 
 You felt that all its principles were in relation with 
 one another. This maturity in his mental atti- 
 tude gave him an air of superiority, just as the 
 strength of his convictions gave a dogmatic quality 
 to his deliverances. Yet in spite of positiveness 
 and tenacity he had the saving grace of a humility 
 which distrusted human nature in himself at least 
 as much as he distrusted it in others. Leading 
 an introspective life, he had many " wrestlings," 
 and often seemed conscious of the stru<rc:;le be- 
 tween the natural man and the spiritual man, as 
 described in the Epistle to the Romans.
 
 90 Biographical Studies 
 
 In these early days, before, and to a less 
 extent after, taking his degree, he used to 
 speak a good deal, mostly on political topics, 
 at the University Debating Society, where so 
 many generations of young men have sharpened 
 their wits upon one another. His speaking 
 was vigorous, shrewd, and full of matter, yet 
 it could not be called popular. It was, in a 
 certain sense, too good for a debating society, 
 too serious, and without the dash and sparkle 
 which tell upon audiences of that kind. Some- 
 times, however, and notably in a debate on the 
 American War of Secession in 1863, he produced, 
 by the concentrated energy of his language and 
 the fierce conviction with which he spoke, a 
 powerful effect.^ In a business assembly, dis- 
 cussing practical questions, he would soon have 
 become prominent, and would have been capable 
 on occasions of an oratorical success. 
 
 Retired as was Green's life, he became by 
 degrees more and more widely known beyond the 
 
 1 As I have referred to the American Civil War, it is worth adding 
 that there were no places in England where the varying fortunes of that 
 tremendous struggle were followed with a more intense interest than in 
 Oxford and Cambridge, and none in which so large a proportion of the 
 educated class sympathised with the cause of the North. Mr. Goldwin 
 Smith led the section which took that view, and which included three- 
 fourths of the best talent in Oxford. Among the younger men Green was 
 the most conspicuous for his ardour on behalf of the principles of human 
 equality and freedom. He followed and watched every move in the 
 military game. No Massachusetts Abolitionist welcomed the fall of 
 Vicksburg with a keener joy. He used to say that the whole future of 
 humanity was involved in the triumph of the Federal arms.
 
 T. H. Green 91 
 
 circle of his own intimates ; and became also, I 
 think, more willing to make new friends. His 
 truthfulness appeared in this that, though power- 
 ful in argument, he did not argue for victory. 
 When he felt the force of what was urg^ed acjainst 
 him, his admissions were candid. Thus people 
 came to respect his character, with its high sense 
 of duty, its simplicity, its uprightness, its earnest 
 devotion to an ideal, even more than they admired 
 his intellectual powers. I remember one friend of 
 my own, himself eminent in undergraduate Oxford, 
 and belonging to another college, between which 
 and Green's there existed much rivalry, who, 
 having been defeated by Green in competition 
 for a University prize, said, " If it had been 
 any one else, I should have been vexed, but I 
 don't mind being beaten by a man I respect so 
 much." My friend knew Green very slightly, 
 and had been at one time strongly prejudiced 
 against him by rumours of his heterodox opinions. 
 So much for those undergraduate days on 
 which recollection loves to dwell, but which were 
 not days of unmixed happiness to Green, for his 
 means were narrow and the future rose cloudy 
 before him. When anxiety was removed by the 
 income which a fellowship secured, he still hesi- 
 tated as to his course in life. At one time he 
 thought of journalism, or of seeking a post in the 
 Education Office. More frequently his thoughts 
 turned to the clerical profession. His theological
 
 92 Biographical Studies 
 
 opinions would not have permitted him to enter 
 the service of the Church of England, but he 
 did seriouslv consider whether he should become 
 a Unitarian minister. It was not till he found 
 that his college needed him as a teacher that 
 these difficulties came to an end. Similarly he 
 had doubted whether to devote himself to history, 
 to theology, or to metaphysics. For history 
 he had unquestionable gifts. With no excep- 
 tional capacity for mastering or retaining facts, 
 he had a remarkable power of penetrating at once 
 to the dominant facts, of grasping their connection, 
 and working out their consequences. He had also 
 a keen sense of the dramatic aspect of events, and 
 a turn, not unlike Carlyle's, partly perhaps formed 
 on Carlyle, of fastening on the details in which 
 character shows itself, and illumining narrative by 
 personal touches. On the problems of theology 
 he had meditated even at school, and after taking 
 his degree he set himself to a systematic study of 
 the German critics, and I remember that when 
 we were living together at Heidelberg he had 
 begun to prepare a translation of F. C. Baur's 
 principal treatise. As he worked slowly, the trans- 
 lation was never finished. Though not pro- 
 fessing to be an adherent of the Tubingen school, 
 he had been fascinated by Baur's ingenuity and 
 constructive power. 
 
 Ultimately he settled down to metaphysical 
 and ethical inquiries, and devoted to these the
 
 T. H. Green 93 
 
 last thirteen years of his Hfe. During his under- 
 graduate years the two intellectual forces most 
 powerful at Oxford had been the writings of 
 J. H. Newman in the religious sphere, though 
 their influence was already past its meridian, and 
 the writings of John Stuart Mill in the sphere 
 of logic and philosophy. By neither of these, 
 save in the way of antagonism, had Green been 
 influenced. He heartily hated all the Utilitarian 
 school, and had an especial scorn for Buckle, who, 
 now almost forgotten, enjoyed in those days, as 
 being supposed to be a philosophic historian, a brief 
 term of popularity. Green had been led by Carlyle 
 to the Germans, and his philosophic thinking was 
 determined chiefly by Kant and Hegel, more 
 perhaps by the former than by the latter, for it 
 was always upon ethical rather than upon purely 
 metaphysical problems that his mind was bent. 
 His religious vein and his hold upon practical 
 life made him more interested in morals than 
 in abstract speculation. Thus he became the 
 leader in Oxford of a new philosophic school 
 which looked to Kant as its master, and which 
 for a time, partly perhaps because it effectively 
 attacked the school of Mill, received the adhesion 
 of some among the most thoughtful of the younger 
 High Churchmen. Like Kant, he set himself to 
 answer David Hume, and the essay prefixed to 
 his edition of Hume's Treatise on Huniaii Nature, 
 along with his Prolegoniena to Ethics, are the only
 
 94 Biographical Studies 
 
 books in which his doctrines have been given to 
 the world, for he did not live to write the more 
 systematic exposition he had planned. These 
 two essays are hard reading, for his philosophical 
 style was usually technical, and sometimes verged 
 on obscurity. But when he wrote on less abstruse 
 matters he was intelligible as well as weighty, full 
 of thought, and with an occasional underglow 
 of restrained eloquence. The force of character 
 and convictions makes itself felt through the 
 language. 
 
 His mind, though constructive, was not, having 
 regard to its general power, either fertile or 
 versatile. Like most of those who prefer solitary 
 musings to the commerce of men, he had little 
 facility, and found it hard to express his thoughts 
 in any other words than those into which his 
 musings had first flowed. Thus even his oral 
 teaching was not easy to follow. An anecdote was 
 current how when one day he had been explaining 
 to a small class his theory of the origin of our 
 ideas, the class listened in rapt attention to 
 his forcible rhetoric, admiring each sentence as 
 it fell, and thinking that all their difficulties 
 were being removed. When he ended they 
 expressed their gratitude for the pleasure he 
 had given them, and were quitting the room, 
 when one, halting at the door, said timidly, 
 " But, Mr. Green, what did you say was really 
 the origin of our ideas ? " However, whether
 
 T. H. Green 95 
 
 they were or were not capable of assimilating 
 his doctrines, his pupils all joined in their respect 
 for him. They felt the loftiness of his character, 
 they recognised the fervour of his belief. He 
 was the most powerful ethical influence, and 
 perhaps also the most stimulative intellectual 
 influence, that in those years played upon the 
 minds of the ablest youth of the University. 
 But it was a singular fact, which those who 
 have never lived in Oxford or Cambridge may 
 And it hard to understand, that when he rose 
 from the post of a college tutor to that of a 
 University professor, his influence declined, not 
 that his powers or his earnestness waned, but 
 because as a professor he had fewer auditors 
 and less personal relation with them than he 
 had commanded as a college teacher. Such is 
 the working of the collegiate system in Oxford, 
 curiously unfortunate when it deprives the ablest 
 men, as they rise naturally to the highest positions, 
 of the opportunities for usefulness they had pre- 
 viously enjoyed. 
 
 As his powers developed and came to be 
 recognised, so did those slight asperities which 
 had been observed in undergraduate days soften 
 down and disappear. Though he lived a retired 
 life, his work brought him into contact with 
 a good many people, and he became more 
 genial in general company. I remember his 
 saying with a smile when I had lured him into
 
 96 Biographical Studies 
 
 Wales for a short excursion, " I don't know 
 whether it is a sign of declining virtue, but I find 
 as I grow older that I am less and less fond of 
 my own company." From the first he had won 
 the confidence and affection of his pupils. Many of 
 them used long afterwards to say that his conduct 
 and his teaching had been the one great example 
 or one great influence they had found and felt in 
 Oxford. The unclouded happiness of his married 
 life made it easier for him to see the bright side of 
 things, and he could not but enjoy the sense that 
 the seed he sowed was falling on ground fit to 
 receive it. Even when ill-health had fastened 
 on him, and was checking both his studies and 
 his public work, it did not affect the evenness of 
 his temper nor sharpen the edge of his judgments 
 of others. In earlier days these had been some- 
 times austere, though expressed in temperate and 
 measured terms. 
 
 I must not forget to add that although 
 Green's opinions were by no means orthodox, the 
 influence he exerted while he remained a college 
 tutor was in large measure a religious influence. 
 As the clergyman used to be in the English Uni- 
 versities less of a clergyman than he was anywhere 
 else, so conversely it caused no surprise there that 
 a lay teacher should concern himself with the 
 religious life of his pupils. Green, however, did 
 more, for he on two occasions at least delivered 
 to his pupils, before the celebration of the
 
 T. H. Green 97 
 
 communion in the college chapel, addresses which 
 were afterwards privately printed, and which pre- 
 sent his view of the relations of ethics and religion 
 in a way impressive even to those who may find 
 it hard to follow the philosophical argument. 
 
 Metaphysicians are generally as little interested 
 in practical politics as poets are, and not better 
 suited for political life. Green was a remarkable 
 exception. Politics were in a certain sense the 
 strongest of his interests. To him metaphysics 
 were not only the basis of theology, but also the 
 basis of politics. Everything was to converge 
 on the free life of the individual in a free State ; 
 rational faith and reason inspired by emotion 
 were to have their perfect work in making the 
 good citizen. 
 
 His interest in politics was perhaps less 
 active in later years than it had been in his 
 youth, but his principles stood unchanged. He 
 was a thoroughgoing Liberal, or what used to be 
 called a Radical, full of faith in the people, an 
 advocate of pretty nearly every measure that 
 tended to democratise English institutions, a 
 friend of peace and of non-intervention. In 
 our days he would have been called a Little 
 Englander, for though his ideal of national life 
 was lofty, the wellbeing of the masses was to 
 him a more essential part of that ideal than any 
 extension of territory or power. He once said 
 that he would rather see the flag of England 
 
 H
 
 98 Biographical Studies 
 
 trailed in the dirt than add sixpence to the taxes 
 that weigh upon the poor. In foreign poHtics 
 Louis Napoleon, as the corrupter of France and 
 the disturber of Europe, was his favourite aver- 
 sion ; in home politics, Lord Palmerston, as the 
 chief obstacle to parliamentary reform. The 
 statesman whom he most admired and trusted 
 was Mr. Bright. A strong sense of civic duty- 
 led him to enter the City Council of Oxford, 
 although he could ill spare from his study and 
 his lecture-room the time which the discharge of 
 municipal duties required. He was the first tutor 
 who had ever offered himself to a ward for election. 
 The townsfolk, between whom and the University 
 there had generally been little love, the former 
 thinking themselves looked down upon by the 
 latter, warmly appreciated his action in coming 
 out of his seclusion to help them, and his influence 
 in the Council contributed to secure some useful 
 reforms, among others, the establishment of a 
 "grammar" or secondary school for the city. 
 
 One of the last things he wrote was a short 
 pamphlet on freedom of contract, intended to 
 justify the interference with bargains between 
 landlord and tenant which was proposed by Mr. 
 Gladstone's Irish Land Bill of 1881. It is a 
 vigorous piece of reasoning, which may still be 
 read with interest in respect of its application 
 of philosophical principles to a political contro- 
 versy. Had he desired it he might have gone
 
 T. H. Green 99 
 
 to the House of Commons as member for the city 
 of Oxford. But he had found in the Council a 
 field for local public work, and apart from his 
 constitutional indolence and his declining health, 
 he had concluded that his first duty lay in expound- 
 ing his philosophical system. 
 
 Green will be long remembered in the English 
 Universities as the strongest force in the sphere 
 of ethical philosophy that they have seen in the 
 second half of the nineteenth century, and re- 
 membered also as a singular instance of a meta- 
 physician with a bent towards politics and practical 
 life, no less than as a thinker far removed from 
 orthodoxy who exerted over orthodox Christians 
 a potent and inspiring religious influence.
 
 ARCHBISHOP TAIT^ 
 
 England is now the only Protestant country in 
 which bishops retain some relics of the dignity 
 and influence which belonged to the episcopal 
 office during the Middle Ages. Even in Roman 
 Catholic countries they have been sadly shorn 
 of their ancient importance, though the prelates 
 of Hungary still hold vast possessions, while in 
 France, or Spain, or the Catholic parts of 
 Germany a man of eminent talents and energy 
 may occasionally use his official position to be- 
 come, through his influence over Catholic electors 
 or Catholic deputies, a considerable political 
 factor. This happens even in the United States 
 and Canada, though in the United States the 
 general feeling that religion must be kept out of 
 politics obliges ecclesiastics to use their spiritual 
 powers cautiously and sparingly. England stands 
 alone in the fact that although the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church is, in so far as she is established 
 by law, the creature and subject of the State, 
 she is nevertheless so far independent as a 
 
 ^ An admirable life of Archbishop Tail by his son-in-law , Dr. R. T. 
 Davidson (now Archbishop of Canterbury), and Canon Benham appeared 
 in 1 89 1. 
 
 100
 
 Archbishop Tait loi 
 
 religious organisation that she retains a greater 
 power than in other Protestant nations. State 
 estabhshment, though it may have depressed, has 
 not stifled her ecclesiastical life, and an interest 
 in ecclesiastical questions is shown by a larger 
 proportion of her laity than one finds in Germany 
 or the Scandinavian kingdoms. A man of shining 
 parts has, as an English bishop, a wide field of 
 action and influence open to him outside the 
 sphere of theology or of purely official duty. And 
 the opportunities of the position attain their maxi- 
 mum when he reaches the primatial chair of 
 Canterbury, which is now the oldest and the most 
 dignified of all the metropolitan sees in countries 
 that have accepted the Reformation of the six- 
 teenth century. 
 
 Ever since there was a bishop at Canterbury 
 at all, that is to say, ever since the conversion of 
 the English began in the seventh century of our 
 era, the holder of that see has been the greatest 
 ecclesiastical personage in these islands, with a 
 recognised authority over all England, as well 
 as an influence and dignity to which, in the 
 Middle Ages, the Archbishops of Armagh and 
 St. Andrews (primates of the Irish and Scottish 
 Churches) practically bowed, even while refusing 
 to admit his legal supremacy. To be the most 
 highly placed and officially the most powerful 
 man in the churches of Britain, in days when 
 the Church was better organised, and in some
 
 I02 Biographical Studies 
 
 ways stronger, than the State, meant a vast deal. 
 The successor of Augustine was often called a 
 Pope of his own world that world of Britain 
 which lay apart from the larger world of the 
 European continent. Down to the Reformation, 
 the English primates possessed a power which 
 made some of them almost a match for the 
 English kings. Dunstan, Lanfranc, Anselm, 
 Thomas (Becket), Hubert, Stephen Langton, 
 Arundel, Warham, were among the foremost 
 statesmen of their time. After Henry VHI.'s 
 breach with Rome, the Primate of England re- 
 ceived some access of dignity in becoming in- 
 dependent of the Pope ; but, in reality, the loss 
 of church power and church wealth which the 
 Reformation caused lowered his political import- 
 ance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
 however, there were still some conspicuous and 
 influential prelates at Canterbury Cranmer, Pole, 
 Whitgift, and Laud the best remembered among 
 them. After the Revolution of 1688, a time of 
 smaller men begins. The office retained its 
 dignity as the highest place open to a subject, 
 ranking above the Lord Chancellor or the Lord 
 President of the Council, but the Church of 
 England, having no fightings within, nor any- 
 thing to fear from without, was lapped in placid 
 ease, so It mattered comparatively little who her 
 chief pastor was. 
 
 Bishoprics were in those days regarded chiefly
 
 Archbishop Tait 103 
 
 as pieces of rich preferment with which prime 
 ministers bought the support of powerful adher- 
 ents. But since the middle of the nineteenth 
 century, as the Anglican Church has become at 
 once more threatened and more energetic, as 
 more of the life of the nation has flowed into 
 her and round her, the office of a bishop 
 has risen in importance. People show more 
 interest in the appointments to be made, and 
 ministers have become proportionately careful 
 in making them. Bishops work harder and are 
 more in the public eye now than they were 
 eighty, or even fifty, years ago. They have 
 lost something of the antique dignity and social 
 consideration which they enjoyed. They no 
 longer wear wigs or ride in State coaches. They 
 may be seen in third-class railway carriages, 
 or sitting on the tops of omnibuses. But they 
 have gained by having countless opportunities 
 opened up to them for exerting influence in 
 philanthropic as well as in religious movements ; 
 and the more zealous among them turn these 
 opportunities to excellent account. 
 
 Whatever is true of an ordinary bishop is true 
 a fortiori of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He 
 is still a great personage, but he is great in a new 
 way, with less of wealth and power but larger 
 opportunities of influence. He is also a kind 
 of Pope in a new way, because he is the central 
 figure of the Anglican communion over the
 
 I04 Biographical Studies 
 
 whole world, with no legal jurisdiction outside 
 England (except in India), but far over-topping 
 all the prelates of that communion in the United 
 States or the British Colonies. Less deference is 
 paid to the office, considered simply as an office, 
 than it received in the Middle Ages, because 
 society and thought have been tinged by the 
 spirit of democratic equality, and people realise 
 that offices are only artificial creations, whose 
 occupants are human beings like themselves. But 
 if he is himself a man of ability and force, he may 
 make his headship of an ancient and venerated 
 church a vantage-ground whence to address the 
 nation as well as the members of his own com- 
 munion. He is sure of being listened to, which is 
 of itself no small matter in a country where many 
 voices are striving to make themselves heard at 
 the same time. The world takes his words into 
 consideration ; the newspapers repeat them. His 
 position gives him easy access to the ministers of 
 the Crown, and implies a confidential intercourse 
 with the Crown itself. He is, or can be, " in 
 touch " with all the political figures who can in 
 any way influence the march of events, and is 
 able to enforce his views upon them. All his 
 conduct is watched by the nation ; so that if it 
 is discreet, provident, animated by high and 
 consistent principle, he gets full credit for 
 whatever he does well, and acquires that in- 
 fluence to which masses of men are eager to
 
 Archbishop Tait 105 
 
 bow whenever they can persuade themselves 
 that it is deserved. During the first half of 
 the nineteenth century the English people was 
 becoming more interested in ecclesiastical and in 
 theological matters than it had been during the 
 century preceding. It grew by slow degrees 
 more inclined to observe ecclesiastical persons, 
 to read and think about theological subjects, to 
 reflect upon the relations which the Church 
 ought to bear to civil life and moral progress. 
 Thus a leader of the Church of England 
 became relatively a more important factor than 
 he had been a century ago, and an arch- 
 bishop, strong by his character, rectitude, and 
 powers of utterance, rose to occupy a more 
 influential, if not more conspicuous, position than 
 his predecessors in the days of the Georges had 
 done. 
 
 These changes naturally made the selection 
 of an archbishop a more delicate and trouble- 
 some business than it was in those good old 
 days. Nobody then blamed a Prime Minister 
 for preferring an aspirant who had the support 
 of powerful political connections. Blameless in 
 life he must be : even the eighteenth century 
 demanded that from candidates for English, if 
 not, according to Dean Swift, for Irish sees. 
 If he was also a man of courtly grace and 
 dignity, and a finished scholar, so much the 
 better. If he was a man of piety, that also was
 
 io6 Biographical Studies 
 
 well. By the time of Queen Victoria the possession 
 of piety and of gifts of speech had become more 
 important qualifications, but the main thing was 
 tactful moderation. Even in apostolic days it was 
 required that a bishop should rule his own house 
 well, and the Popes esteemed most saintly have 
 not always been the best, as the famous instance 
 of Celestine the Fifth attests. An archbishop 
 must first and foremost be a discreet and guarded 
 man, expressing few opinions, and those not ex- 
 treme ones. His chief virtue came to be, if not 
 the purely negative one of offending no section by 
 expressing the distinctive views of any other, yet 
 that of swerving so little from the via media be- 
 tween Rome and Geneva that neither the Tract- 
 arian party, who began to be feared after 1837, 
 nor the pronounced Low Churchmen could claim 
 the Primate as disposed to favour their opinions. 
 In the case of ordinary bishops the plan could 
 be adopted, and has since the days of Lord 
 Palmerston been mostly followed, of giving every 
 party its turn, while choosing from every party 
 men of the safer sort. This method, however, 
 was less applicable to the See of Canterbury, for 
 a man on whose action much might turn could 
 not well be taken from any particular section. 
 The acts and words of a Primate, who is expected 
 to " give a line " to the clergy generally and to 
 speak on behalf of the bench of bishops as a 
 whole, are so closely scrutinised that he must
 
 Archbishop Tait 107 
 
 be prudent and wary, yet not so wary as to seem 
 timid. He ought to be both firm and suave, 
 conciliatory and decided. That he may do 
 justice to all sections of the Church of Eng- 
 land, he ought not to be an avowed partisan 
 of any. Yet he must be able and eminent, and 
 of course able and eminent men are apt to throw 
 themselves into some one line of action or set 
 of views, and so come to be considered partisans. 
 The position which the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury holds as the representative in Parliament 
 of the whole Established Church, makes states- 
 manship the most important of all qualifica- 
 tions. Learning, energy, eloquence, piety would 
 none of them, nor all of them together, make 
 up for the want of calmness and wisdom. Yet 
 all those qualities are obviously desirable, because 
 they strengthen as well as adorn the primate's 
 position. 
 
 Archibald Campbell Tait (born in Scotland in 
 181 r, died 1882) was educated at Glasgow Univer- 
 sity and at Balliol College, Oxford ; worked at 
 his college for some years as a tutor, succeeded 
 Dr. Arnold as headmaster of Rugby School in 
 1842, became Dean of Carlisle and then Bishop 
 of London, and was translated to Canterbury 
 in 1868. It has been generally understood that 
 Mr. Disraeli, then Prime Minister, suggested 
 another prelate for the post, but the Queen, 
 who did not share her minister's estimate of
 
 io8 Biographical Studies 
 
 that prelate, expressed a preference for Tait. 
 Her choice was amply justified, for Tait united, 
 and indeed possessed in a high degree, the 
 qualifications which have just been enumerated. 
 He was, if it be not a paradox to say so, more 
 remarkable as an archbishop than as a man. He 
 had no original power as a thinker. He was 
 not a striking preacher, and the more pains he 
 took with his sermons the less interesting did they 
 become. He was so far from being learned that 
 you could say no more of him than that he was 
 a sound scholar and a well-informed man. He 
 was deeply and earnestly pious, but in a quiet, 
 almost dry way, which lacked what is called 
 unction, though it impressed those who were 
 in close contact with him. He showed slight 
 interest either in the historical or in the specula- 
 tive side of theology. Though a good head- 
 master, he was not a stimulating teacher. Had 
 he remained all his life in a subordinate position, 
 as a college tutor at Oxford, or as canon of 
 some cathedral, he would have discharged the 
 duties of the position in a thoroughly satis- 
 factory way, and would have acquired influence 
 among his colleagues, but no one would have 
 felt that Fate had dealt unfairly with him in 
 depriving him of some larger career and loftier 
 post. No one, indeed, who knew him when he 
 was a college tutor seems to have predicted 
 the dignities he was destined to attain, although
 
 Archbishop Tait 109 
 
 he had shown in the theological strife that then 
 raged at Oxford the courage and independence 
 of his character. 
 
 In what, then, did the secret of his success 
 lie the secret, that is, of his acquitting himself 
 so excellently in those dignities as to have 
 become almost a model to his own and the 
 next generation of what an Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury ought to be ? In the statesmanlike quality 
 of his mind. He had not merely moderation, 
 but what, though often confounded with modera- 
 tion, is something rarer and better, a steady 
 balance of mind. He was carried about by 
 no winds of doctrine. He seldom yielded to 
 impulses, and was never so seduced by any one 
 theory as to lose sight of other views and condi- 
 tions which had to be regarded. He was, I think, 
 the first man of Scottish birth who ever rose to 
 be Primate of England, and he had the cautious 
 self-restraint which is deemed characteristic of his 
 nation. He knew how to be dignified without 
 assumption, firm without vehemence, prudent 
 without timidity, judicious without coldness. 
 He was, above all things, a singularly just 
 man, who recognised every one's rights, and 
 did not seek to overbear them by an exercise 
 of authority. He was as ready to listen to his 
 opponents as to his friends. Indeed, he so held 
 himself as to appear to have no opponents, but 
 to be rather a judge before whom different
 
 I lO 
 
 Biographical Studies 
 
 advocates were stating their respective cases, 
 than a leader seeking to make his own views 
 or his own party prevail. Genial he could 
 hardly be called, for there was little warmth, 
 little display of emotion, in his manner ; and the 
 clergy noted, at least in his earlier episcopal 
 days, a touch of the headmaster in his way of 
 receiving them. But he was simple and kindly, 
 capable of seeing the humorous side of things, 
 desiring to believe the good rather than the 
 evil, and to lead people instead of driving them. 
 With all his caution he was direct and straight- 
 forward, saying no more than was necessary, 
 but saying nothing he had occasion to be ashamed 
 of. He sometimes made mistakes, but they were 
 not mistakes of the heart, and, being free from 
 vanity or self-conceit, he was willing in his quiet 
 way to admit them and to alter his course accord- 
 ingly. So his character by degrees gained upon 
 the nation, and so even ecclesiastical partisan- 
 ship, proverbially more bitter than political, 
 because it springs from deeper wells of feeling, 
 grew to respect and spare him. The influence 
 he obtained went far to strengthen the position 
 of the Established Church, and to keep its 
 several parties from breaking out into more open 
 hostility with one another. He himself inclined 
 to what might be called a moderate Broad 
 Church attitude, leaning more to Evangelical 
 than to Tractarian or Romanising views in
 
 Archbishop Tait 1 1 1 
 
 matters of doctrine. At one time the extreme 
 High Churchmen regarded him as an enemy. 
 But this unfriendHness had almost died away 
 when the death of his wife and his only son 
 (a young man of singularly winning character), 
 followed by his own long illness, stilled the voices 
 of criticism. 
 
 He exerted great influence in the House 
 of Lords by his tact, by his firmness of 
 character, and by the consistency of his public 
 course, as well as by powers of speech, which, 
 matured by long practice, had risen to a 
 high level. Without eloquence, without either 
 imagination or passion, which are the chief 
 elements in eloquence, he had a grave, weighty, 
 thoughtful style which impressed that fastidious 
 audience. His voice was strong and sonorous, 
 his diction plain yet pure and dignified, his 
 matter well considered. His thousfht moved 
 on a high plane ; he spoke as one who fully 
 believed every word he said. The late Bishop 
 of Winchester, the famous Dr. Samuel Wilber- 
 force, was incomparably his superior not only 
 as a talker but as an orator, but no less inferior 
 in his power over the House of Lords, for 
 so little does rhetorical brilliance count in a 
 critical and practical assembly. Next to courage, 
 the quality which gains trust and regard in a 
 deliberative body is that which is familiarly 
 described when it is said of a man, "You always
 
 112 Biographical Studies 
 
 know where to find him." Tait belonged to no 
 party. But his principles, though not rigid, were 
 fixed and settled ; his words and votes were the 
 expression of his principles. 
 
 The presence of bishops in the House of 
 Lords is disapproved by some sections of English 
 opinion, and there are those among the temporal 
 peers who, quite apart from any political feeling, 
 are said to regard them with little favour. But 
 every one must admit that they have raised 
 and adorned the debates in that chamber. 
 Besides Tait and Wilberforce, two other prelates 
 of the same generation stood in the front 
 rank of speakers. Dr. Magee, whose wit and 
 fire would have found a more fitting theatre 
 in the House of Commons, and Dr. Thirlwall, 
 a scholar and historian whose massive intellect 
 and stately diction were too rarely used to raise 
 great political issues above the dust-storms of 
 party controversy. 
 
 Perhaps no Archbishop since the Revolution 
 of 1688 has exercised so much influence as Dr. 
 Tait, and certainly none within living memory 
 is so well entitled to be credited with a definite 
 ecclesiastical policy. His aim was to widen the 
 bounds of the Church of England, so far as the law- 
 could, without evasion, be stretched for that pur- 
 pose. He bore a leading part in obtaining an Act of 
 Parliament which introduced a new and less strict 
 form of clerical subscription. He realised that the
 
 Archbishop Tait 113 
 
 Church of England can maintain her position 
 as a State Church only by adapting herself to 
 the movements of opinion, and accordingly he 
 voted for the Divorce Bill of 1857, and for the 
 Burials Bill, which relieved Dissenters from a 
 grievance that exposed the Established Church 
 to odium. The Irish Church Disestablishment 
 Bill of 1869 threw upon him, at the critical 
 moment when it went from the House of 
 Commons, where it had passed by a large 
 majority, to the House of Lords, where a still 
 larger majority was hostile, a duty delicate in 
 itself, and such as seldom falls to the lot of a 
 prelate. The Queen wrote to him suggesting 
 that he should endeavour to effect a compro- 
 mise between Mr. Gladstone, then head of the 
 Liberal Ministry, and the leading Tory peers 
 who were opposing the Bill, He conducted the 
 negotiation with tact and judgment, and succeeded 
 in securing good pecuniary terms for the Pro- 
 testant Episcopal Establishment. Though he 
 had joined in the Letter of the Bishops which 
 conveyed their strong disapproval of the book 
 called Essays and Reviews (whose supposed 
 heretical tendencies roused such a storm in 
 1 861), and had thereby displeased his friends, 
 Temple (afterwards archbishop), Jowett, and 
 Stanley,^ he joined in the judgment of the Privy 
 
 ^ They thought his public action scarcely consistent with the language 
 he had used to Temple in private. 
 
 I
 
 114 Biographical Studies 
 
 Council which in 1863 dismissed the charges 
 against the impugned Essayists. Despite his 
 advocacy of the Bill which in 1874 provided a 
 new procedure to be used against clergymen 
 transgressing the ritual prescribed by law, he 
 discouraged prosecutions, and did his utmost 
 to keep Ritualists as well as moderate Ration- 
 alists within the pale of the Church of England. 
 He did not succeed no one could have suc- 
 ceeded, even though he had spoken with the 
 tongues of men and of angels in stilling ecclesi- 
 astical strife. The controversies of his days still 
 rage, though in a slightly different form. But 
 in refusing to yield to the pressure of any section, 
 in regarding the opinion of the laity rather than 
 that of the clergy, in keeping close to the law 
 yet giving it the widest possible interpretation, 
 he laid down the lines on which the Anglican 
 Established Church can best be defended and 
 upheld. That she will last, as an Establish- 
 ment, for any very long time, will hardly be 
 expected by those who mark the direction in 
 which thought tends to move all over the civil- 
 ised world. But Tait's policy and personality 
 have counted for something in prolonging the 
 time-honoured connection of the Anglican Church 
 with the English State. 
 
 Perhaps a doubtful service either to the Church 
 or to the State. Yet even those who regret 
 the connection, and who, surveying the long
 
 Archbishop Tait 115 
 
 course of Christian history from the days of the 
 Emperor Constantine down to our own, beHeve 
 that the Christian Church would have been 
 spiritually purer and morally more effective had 
 she never become either the mistress or the 
 servant or the ally of the State, but relied on 
 her divine commission only, may wish that, when 
 the day arrives for the ancient bond to be unloosed, 
 it should be unloosed not through an embittered 
 political struggle, but because the general senti- 
 ment of the nation, and primarily of religious 
 men throughout the nation, has come to approve 
 the change.
 
 ANTHONY TROLLOPE 
 
 When Mr. Anthony Trollope died (December 
 II, 1882) at the age of sixty-seven, he was the 
 best known of our English writers of fiction, 
 and stood foremost among them if the double 
 test of real merit and wide popularity be applied. 
 Some writers, such as Wilkie Collins, may have 
 commanded a larger sale. One writer at least, Mr. 
 George Meredith, had produced work of far deeper 
 insight and higher imaginative power. But the 
 gifts of Mr. Meredith had then scarcely begun 
 to win recognition, and not one reader knew his 
 name for five who knew Trollope's. So Mr. 
 Thomas Hardy had published what many continue 
 to think his two best stories, but they had not 
 yet caught the eye of the general public. Mrs, 
 Oliphant, high as was the general level of her 
 work, and inexhaustible as her fertility appeared, 
 had not cut her name so deep upon the time 
 as Trollope did. Everything she did was good, 
 nothing superlatively good. No one placed 
 
 ^ Trollope's autobiography, published in 1883, is a good specimen of 
 self- portraiture, candid, straightforward, and healthy, and leaves an 
 agreeable impression of the writer. Dr. Richard Garnett has written well 
 of him in the Dictionary of National Biography. 
 
 116
 
 Anthony Trollope 1 1 7 
 
 Trollope in the first rank of creative novelists 
 beside Dickens or Thackeray, or beside George 
 Eliot, who had died two years before. But in 
 the second rank he stood high ; and though 
 other novelists may have had as many readers 
 as he, none was in so many ways represen- 
 tative of the general character and spirit 
 of English fiction. He had established his 
 reputation nearly thirty years before, when 
 Thackeray and Dickens were still in the fulness 
 of their fame ; and had maintained it during 
 the zenith of George Eliot's. For more than 
 a generation his readers had come from the 
 best-educated classes as well as from those who 
 lack patience or taste for anything heavier 
 than a story of adventure. In this respect 
 he stood above Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry 
 Wood, Ouida, and other heroines of the circu- 
 lating libraries, and also above such more 
 artistic or less sensational writers as William 
 Black, Walter Besant, James Payn, and Whyte 
 Melville. (The school of so-called realistic 
 fiction had scarcely begun to appear.) None 
 of these had, like Trollope, succeeded in making 
 their creations a part of the common thought ot 
 cultivated Englishmen ; none had, like him, given 
 us characters which we treat as ty[)ical men and 
 women, and discuss at a dinner-table as though 
 they were real people. Mrs. Proudie, for instance, 
 the Bishop of Barchester's wife, to take the most
 
 1 1 8 Biographical Studies 
 
 obvious instance (though not that most favourable 
 to Trollope, for he produced better portraits than 
 hers), or Archdeacon Grantly, was when Trollope 
 died as familiar a name to English men and 
 women between sixty and thirty years of age 
 as Wilkins Micawber, or Blanche Amory, or 
 Rosamond Lydgate. There was no other living 
 novelist of whose personages the same could be 
 said, and perhaps none since has attained this 
 particular kind of success. 
 
 Personally, Anthony Trollope was a bluff, 
 genial, hearty, vigorous man, typically English 
 in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes. His 
 large eyes, which looked larger behind his large 
 spectacles, were full of good-humoured life and 
 force ; and though he was neither witty nor 
 brilliant in conversation, he was what is called 
 very good company, having travelled widely, 
 known all sorts of people, and formed views, 
 usually positive views, on all the subjects of 
 the day, views which he was prompt to declare 
 and maintain. There was not much novelty in 
 them you were disappointed not to find so 
 clever a writer more original but they were 
 worth listening to for their solid common-sense, 
 tending rather to commonplace sense, and you 
 enjoyed the ardour with which he threw him- 
 self into a discussion. Though boisterous and 
 insistent in his talk, he was free from assumption 
 or conceit, and gave the impression of liking the
 
 Anthony Trollopc 119 
 
 world he lived in, and being satisfied with his 
 own place in it. Neither did one observe in him 
 that erratic turn which is commonly attributed to 
 literary men. He was a steady and regular worker, 
 who rose every morning between five and six to 
 turn out a certain quantity of copy for the printer 
 before breakfast, enjoying his work, and fond of 
 his own characters indeed he declared that he 
 filled his mind with them and saw them moving 
 before him yet composing a novel just as other 
 people might compose tables of statistics. These 
 methodical habits were to some extent due to his 
 traininor as a clerk in the Post Of^ce, where he 
 spent the earlier half of his working life, having 
 retired in 1864. He did not neglect his duties 
 there, even when occupied in writing, and claimed 
 to have been the inventor of the pillar letter-box. 
 It was probably in his tours as an inspector of 
 postal deliveries that he obtained that knowledge 
 of rural life which gives reality to his pictures 
 of country society. He turned his Civil Service 
 experiences to account in some of his stories, 
 giving faithful and characteristic sketches, in 
 The Three Cle^'ks and The Small Hotise at 
 Allington, of different types of Government 
 officials, a class which is much more of a class in 
 England than it is in America, though less of 
 a class than it is in Germany or France. His 
 favourite amusement was hunting, as readers of his 
 novels know, and until his latest years he might
 
 I20 Biographical Studies 
 
 have been seen, though a heavy weight, following 
 the hounds in Essex once or twice a week. 
 
 When E. A. Freeman wrote a magazine 
 article denouncing the cruelty of field sports, 
 Trollope replied, defending the amusement he 
 loved. Some one said it was a collision of two 
 rough diamonds. But the end was that Freeman 
 invited Trollope to come and stay with him at 
 Wells, and they became great friends. 
 
 Like most of his literary contemporaries, he 
 was a politician, and indeed a pretty keen one. 
 He once contested in the Liberal interest in 
 those days literary men were mostly Liberals the 
 borough of Beverley in Yorkshire, a corrupt little 
 place, where bribery proved too strong for him. 
 It was thereafter disfranchised as a punishment 
 for its misdeeds ; and his costly experiences doubt- 
 less suggested the clever electioneering sketches 
 in the story of Ralph the Heir. Thackeray also 
 was once a Liberal candidate. He stood for the 
 city of Oxford, and the story was current there for 
 years afterwards how the freemen of the borough 
 (not an exemplary class of voters) rose to an un- 
 wonted height of virtue by declaring that though 
 they did not understand his speeches or know 
 who he was, they would vote for him, expecting 
 nothing, because he was a friend of Mr. Neate's. 
 Trollope showed his continued interest in public 
 affairs by appearing on the platform at the great 
 meeting in St. James's Hall in December 1876,
 
 Anthony Trollope 121 
 
 which was the beginning of a vehement party 
 struggle over the Eastern Question that only 
 ended at the general election of 1880. He was 
 a direct and forcible speaker, who would have 
 made his way had he entered Parliament. But 
 as he had no practical experience of politics 
 either in the House of Commons or as a working 
 member of a party organisation in a city where 
 contests are keen, the pictures of political life 
 which are so frequent in his later tales have 
 not much flavour of reality. They are sketches 
 obviously taken from the outside. Very rarely 
 do even the best writers of fiction succeed in re- 
 producing any special and peculiar kind of life and 
 atmosphere. Of the various stories that purport 
 to describe what goes on in the English Parlia- 
 ment, none gives to those who know the social 
 conditions and habits of the place an impression 
 of truth to nature, and the same has often been 
 remarked with regard to tales of English Uni- 
 versity life. Trollope, however, with his quick 
 eye for the superficial aspects of any society, 
 and his gift for noting the characteristics which 
 men have as members of any particular class, 
 might have described the House of Commons 
 admirably had he sat in it himself. He was 
 fond of travel, and between 1862 and 1880 
 visited the United States, the West Indies, 
 Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa, 
 about all of which he wrote books which, if
 
 122 Biographical Studies 
 
 hardly of permanent value, were fresh, vigorous, 
 and eminently readable, conveying a definite and 
 generally correct impression of the more obvious 
 social and economic phenomena he found then 
 existing. His account of the United States, 
 for instance, is excellent, and did something to 
 make the Americans forgive the asperity with 
 which his mother had described her experiences 
 there many years before. Trollope's travel 
 sketches are as much superior in truthfulness to 
 Froude's descriptions of the same regions as 
 they are inferior in the allurements of style. 
 
 The old classification of novels, based on the 
 two most necessary elements of a drama, divided 
 them into novels of plot and novels of character. 
 To these we have of late years added novels of 
 incident or adventure, novels of conversation, 
 novels of manners, not to speak of " novels 
 with a purpose," which are sermons or pamphlets 
 in disguise. No one doubted to which of these 
 categories Trollope's work should be referred. 
 There was in his stories as little plot as a story 
 can well have. The conversations never beamed 
 with humour like that of Scott, nor glittered 
 with aphorisms like those of George Meredith. 
 The incidents carried the reader pleasantly along, 
 but seldom surprised him by any ingenuity of 
 contrivance. Character there was, and, indeed, 
 great fertility in the creation of character, for 
 there is hardly one of the tales in which three
 
 Anthony TroUope 123 
 
 or four at least of the personages do not stand 
 out as people whom you would know again if 
 you met them years after. But the conspicuous 
 merit of Trollope's novels, in the eyes of his 
 own countrymen, is their value as pictures of 
 contemporary manners. Here he may claim 
 to have been surpassed by no writer of his 
 own generation. Dickens, with all his great 
 and splendid gifts, did not describe the society 
 he lived in. His personages were too un- 
 usual and peculiar to speak and act and think 
 like the ordinary men and women of the nine- 
 teenth century ; nor would a foreigner, however 
 much he might enjoy the exuberant humour and 
 dramatic power with which they are presented, 
 learn from them much about the ways and habits 
 of the average Englishman. The everyday life 
 to which the stories are most true is the life 
 of the lower middle class in London ; and some 
 one has observed that although this class changes 
 less quickly than the classes above it, it is already 
 unlike that which Dickens saw when in the 
 'thirties he was a police-court reporter. Critics 
 have, indeed, said that Dickens was too great 
 a painter to be a good photographer, but the 
 two arts are not incompatible, as appears from 
 the skill with which Walter Scott, for instance, 
 portrayed the peasantry of his own country in 
 The Antiquary. Thackeray, again, though he 
 has described certain sections of the upper or
 
 124 Biographical Studies 
 
 upper middle class with far more power and 
 
 delicacy than Trollope ever reached, does not 
 
 go beyond those sections, and has little to tell 
 
 us about the middle class generally, still less 
 
 about the classes beneath them. Trollope 
 
 was thoroughly at home in the English middle 
 
 class and also (though less perfectly) in the 
 
 upper class ; and his pictures are all the more 
 
 true to life because there is not that vein of 
 
 stern or cynical reflection which runs through 
 
 Thackeray, and makes us think less of the 
 
 story than of the moral. Trollope usually has 
 
 a moral, but it is so obvious, so plainly and 
 
 quietly put, that it does not distract attention 
 
 from the minor incidents and little touches of 
 
 every day which render the sketches lifelike. If 
 
 even his best-drawn characters are not far removed 
 
 from the commonplace this helps to make them 
 
 fairly represent the current habits and notions of 
 
 their time. They are the same people we meet 
 
 in the street or at a dinner-party ; and they are 
 
 mostly seen under no more exciting conditions than 
 
 those of a hunting meet, or a lawn-tennis match, 
 
 or an afternoon tea. They are flirting or talking 
 
 for effect, or scheming for some petty temporary 
 
 end ; they are not under the influence of strong 
 
 passions, or forced into striking situations, like 
 
 the leading characters in Charlotte Bronte's or 
 
 George Eliot's novels ; and for this reason again 
 
 they represent faithfully the ordinary surface of
 
 Anthony Trollope 125 
 
 English upper and upper middle class society : 
 its prejudices, its little pharisaisms and hypocrisies, 
 its snobbishness, its worship of conventionalities, 
 its aloofness from or condescension to those 
 whom it deems below its own level ; and there- 
 with also its public spirit, its self- helpfulness, 
 its neighbourliness, its respect for honesty and 
 straightforwardness, its easy friendliness of manner 
 towards all who stand within the sacred pale 
 of social recognition. Nor, again, has any one 
 more skilfully noted and set down those transient 
 tastes and fashions which are, so to speak, the 
 trimmings of the dress, and which, transient 
 though they are, and quickly forgotten by con- 
 temporaries, will have an interest for one who, 
 a century or two hence, feels the same curiosity 
 about our manners as we feel about those of 
 the subjects of King George the Third. That 
 Trollope will be read at all fifty years after 
 his death one may hesitate to predict, con- 
 sidering how comparatively few in the present 
 generation read Richardson, or Fielding, or Miss 
 Edgreworth, or Charlotte Bronte, and how much 
 reduced is the number of those who read even 
 Walter Scott and Thackeray. But whoever 
 does read Trollope in 1930 will gather from his 
 pages better than from any others an impression 
 of what everyday life was like in England in the 
 "middle Victorian" period. The aspects of that 
 life were already, when his latest books were
 
 126 Biographical Studies 
 
 written, beginning to change, and the features he 
 drew are fast receding into history. Even the 
 clergy of 185 2- 1862 are no longer, except in quiet 
 country districts, the same as the clergy we now see. 
 People have often compared the personal im- 
 pressions which eminent writers make on those 
 who talk to them with the impressions previously 
 derived from their works. Thomas Carlyle and 
 Robert Browning used to be taken as two 
 instances representing opposite extremes. Carlyle 
 always talked in character : had there been phono- 
 graphs in his days, the phonographed "record" 
 might have been printed as part of one of his 
 books. Browning, on the other hand, seemed 
 unlike what his poems had made a reader 
 expect : it was only after a long tete-a-tete with 
 him that the poet whose mind had been learned 
 through his works stood revealed. Trollope at 
 first caused a similar though less marked surprise. 
 This bluff burly man did not seem the kind of 
 person who would trace with a delicate touch 
 the sunlight sparkling on, or a gust of temper 
 ruffling, the surface of a youthful soul in love. 
 Upon further knowledge one perceived that 
 the features of Trollope's talent, facile inven- 
 tion, quick observation, and a strong common- 
 sense view of things, with little originality or 
 intensity, were really the dominant features of his 
 character as expressed in talk. Still, though the 
 man was more of a piece with his books than he
 
 Anthony Trollope 127 
 
 had seemed, one could never quite recognise in 
 him the deh'neator of Lily Dale. 
 
 As a painter of manners he recalls two of his 
 predecessors one greater, one less great than 
 himself. In his limitations and in his fidelity 
 to the aspects of daily life as he saw them, he 
 resembles Miss Austen. He is inferior to her 
 in delicacy of portraiture, in finish, in atmosphere. 
 No two of his books can be placed on a level 
 with Emma and Persuasion. On the other hand, 
 while he has done for the years 1850- 1870 what 
 Miss Burney did for 1770- 1790, most critics will 
 place him above her both in fertility and in 
 naturalness. Her characters are apt either to 
 want colour, like the heroines of Evelina and 
 Cecilia, or to be so exaggerated, like Mr. Briggs 
 and Miss Larolles, as to approach the grotesque. 
 Trollope is a realist in the sense of being, in all 
 but a few of his books, on the lines of normal 
 humanity, though he is seldom strong enough to 
 succeed, when he pierces down to the bed-rock of 
 human nature, in rendering the primal passions 
 either solemn or terrible. Like Miss Austen, he 
 attains actuality by observation rather than by 
 imagination, hardly ever entering the sphere of 
 poetry. 
 
 His range was not wide, for he could not 
 present either grand characters or tragical situa- 
 tions, any more than he could break out into 
 the splendid humour of Dickens. His wings
 
 128 Biographical Studies 
 
 never raised him far above the level floor of 
 earth. But within that limited range he had 
 surprising fertility. His clerical portrait-gallery 
 is the most complete that any English novelist 
 has given us. No two faces are exactly alike, 
 and yet all are such people as one might see 
 any day in the pulpit. So, again, there is 
 scarcely one of his stories in which a young 
 lady is not engaged, formally or practically, to 
 two men at the same time, or one man more 
 or less committed to two women ; yet no story 
 repeats exactly the situation, or raises the 
 problem of honour and duty in quite the same 
 form as it appears in the stories that went 
 before. Few people who have written so much 
 have so little appeared to be exhausting their 
 invention. 
 
 It must, however, be admitted that Trollope's 
 fame might have stood higher if he had written 
 less. The public which had been delighted with 
 his earlier groups of novels, and especially 
 with that group in which The Warden comes 
 first and Barchester Towers second, began 
 latterly to tire of what they had come to deem 
 the mannerisms of their favourite, and felt that 
 they now knew the compass of his gifts. 
 Partly, perhaps, because he feared to be always 
 too like himself, he once or twice attempted 
 to represent more improbable situations and ex- 
 ceptional personages. But the attempt was not
 
 Anthony TroUope 129 
 
 successful. He lost his touch of ordinary life 
 without getting into any higher region of poetical 
 truth ; and in his latest stories he had begun to 
 return to his earlier and better manner. 
 
 New tendencies, moreover, embodying them- 
 selves in new schools, were already beginning to 
 appear. R. L. Stevenson as leader of the school 
 of adventure, Mr. Henry James as the apostle of 
 the school of psychological analysis, soon to be 
 followed by Mr. Kipling with a type of imaginative 
 directness distinctively his own, were beginning to 
 lead minds and tastes into other directions. The 
 influence of France was more felt than it had 
 been when Trollope began to write. And what a 
 contrast between Trollope's manner and that of 
 his chief French contemporaries, such as Octave 
 Feuillet or Alphonse Daudet or Guy de Mau- 
 passant ! The French novelists, be their faculty of 
 invention greater or less, at any rate studied their 
 characters with more care than English writers 
 had usually shown. The characters were fewer, 
 almost as few as in a classical drama ; and 
 the whole action of the story is carefully sub- 
 ordinated to the development of these char- 
 acters, and the placing of them in a critical 
 position which sets their strength and weak- 
 ness in the fullest liorht. There was more of a 
 judicious adaptation of the parts to the whole 
 in French fiction than in ours, and therefore more 
 unity of impression was attained. Trollope, no
 
 130 Biographical Studies 
 
 doubt, set a bad example in this respect. He 
 crowded his canvas with figures ; he pursued the 
 fortunes of three or four sets of people at the same 
 time, caring little how the fate of the one set 
 affected that of the others ; he made his novel a 
 sort of chronicle which you might open anywhere 
 and close anywhere, instead of a drama animated 
 by one idea and converging towards one centre. 
 He neglected the art which uses incidents small 
 in themselves to lead up to the d^noument and make 
 it more striking. He took little pains with his 
 diction, seeming not to care how he said what he 
 had to say. These defects strike those who turn 
 over his pages to-day. But to those who read 
 him in the 'fifties or 'sixties, the carelessness was 
 redeemed by, or forgotten in, the vivacity with 
 which the story moved, the freshness and faithful- 
 ness of its pictures of character and manners.
 
 JOHN RICHARD GREEN ^ 
 
 John Richard Green was born in Oxford 
 on 1 2th December 1837, and educated first 
 at Magdalen College School, and afterwards, 
 for a short time, at a private tutor's. He 
 was a singularly quick and bright boy, and at 
 sixteen obtained by competition a scholarship 
 at Jesus College, Oxford, where he began to 
 reside in 1856. The members of that college 
 were in those days almost entirely Welshmen, and 
 thereby somewhat cut off from the rest of the 
 University. They saw little of men in other 
 colleges, so that a man might have a re- 
 putation for ability in his own society without 
 gaining any in the larger world of Oxford. It 
 so happened with Green. Though his few 
 intimate friends perceived his powers, they had 
 so little intercourse with the rest of the Uni- 
 versity, either by way of breakfasts and wine- 
 parties, or at the University debating society, 
 
 ' This sketch was written in 1S83. A volume of Green's Letters, with 
 a short connecting biography by Sir Leslie Stephen, was published in 
 1 90 1. The letters are extremely good reading, the biography faithful and 
 graceful.
 
 132 Biographical Studies 
 
 or in athletic sports, that he remained unknown 
 even to those among his contemporaries who 
 were interested in the same things, and would 
 have most enjoyed his acquaintance. The only 
 eminent person who seems to have appreciated 
 and influenced him was Dean Stanley, then 
 Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of 
 Christ Church. Green had attended Stanley's 
 lectures, and Stanley, whose kindly interest in 
 young men never failed, was struck by him, and 
 had some share in turning his studies towards 
 history. He graduated in i860, having refused 
 to compete for honours, because he had not 
 received from those who were then tutors of the 
 college the recognition to which he was entitled. 
 
 In i860 he was ordained, and became curate 
 in London at St. Barnabas, King's Square, 
 whence, after two years' experience, and one or 
 two temporary engagements, including the sole 
 charge of a parish in Hoxton, he was appointed 
 in 1865 to the incumbency of St. Philip's, Stepney, 
 a district church in one of the poorest parts of 
 London, where the vicar's income was ill-propor- 
 tioned to the claims which needy parishioners 
 made upon him. Here he worked with zeal 
 and assiduity for about three years, gaining an 
 insight into the condition and needs of the poor 
 which scholars and historians seldom obtain. 
 He learnt, in fact, to know men, and the real 
 forces that sway them ; and he used to say in
 
 John Richard Green 133 
 
 later life that he was conscious how much this 
 had helped him in historical writing. Gibbon, 
 as every one knows, makes a similar remark 
 about his experience as a captain in the Hamp- 
 shire militia. 
 
 Green threw the whole force of his nature 
 into the parish schools, spending some part of 
 every day in them ; he visited incessantly, and 
 took an active part in the movement for regulat- 
 ing and controlling private charity which led 
 to the formation of the Charity Organisation 
 Society. An outbreak of cholera and period 
 of distress among the poor which occurred 
 during his incumbency drew warm-hearted men 
 from other parts of London to give their 
 help to the clergy of the East End. Edward 
 Denison, who was long affectionately remem- 
 bered by many who knew him in Oxford and 
 London, chose Green's parish to work in, and 
 the two friends confirmed one another in their 
 crusade against indiscriminate and demoralising 
 charity. It was at this time that Green, who 
 spent upon the parish nearly all that he received 
 as vicar, found himself obliged to earn some 
 money by other means, and began to write 
 for the Saturday Review. The addition of 
 this labour to the daily fatigues of his parish 
 duties told on his health, which had always 
 been delicate, and made him willingly accept 
 from Archbishop Tait, who had early marked
 
 134 Biographical Studies 
 
 and learned to value his abilities, the post of 
 librarian at Lambeth. He quitted Stepney, and 
 never took any other clerical work. 
 
 Although physical weakness was one of the 
 causes which compelled this step, there was also 
 another. He had been brought up in Tractarian 
 views, and is said to have been at one time on 
 the point of entering the Church of Rome. This 
 tendency passed off, and before he went to St. 
 Philip's he had become a Broad Churchman, and 
 was much influenced by the writings of Mr. F. 
 D. Maurice, whom he knew and used frequently 
 to meet, and whose pure and noble character, 
 even more perhaps than his preaching, had 
 profoundly impressed him. However, his restless 
 mind did not stop long at that point. The same 
 tendency which had carried him away from 
 Tractarianism made him feel less and less at 
 home in the ministry of the Church of England, 
 and would doubtless have led him, even had his 
 health been stronger, to withdraw from clerical 
 duties. After a few years his friends ceased to 
 address letters to him under the usual clerical 
 epithet ; but he continued to interest himself in 
 ecclesiastical affairs, and always retained a marked 
 dislike to Nonconformity. Aversions sometimes 
 outlive attachments. 
 
 On leaving Stepney he went to live in lodgings 
 in Beaumont Street, Marylebone, and divided 
 his time between Lambeth and literary work.
 
 John Richard Green 135 
 
 He now during several years wrote a good deal 
 for the Saturday Review, and his articles were 
 among the best which then appeared in that 
 organ. The most valuable of them were re- 
 views of historical books, and descriptions from 
 the historical point of view of cities or other re- 
 markable places, especially English and French 
 towns. Some of these are masterpieces. Other 
 articles were on social, or what may be called 
 occasional, topics, and attracted much notice at 
 the time from their gaiety and lightness of touch, 
 which sometimes seemed to pass into flippancy. 
 He never wrote upon politics, nor was he in the 
 ordinary sense of the word a journalist, for with 
 the exception of these social articles, his work 
 was all done in his own historical field, and done 
 with as much care and pains as others would 
 bestow on the composition of a book. Upon 
 this subject I may quote the words of one of his 
 oldest and most intimate friends (Mr. Stopford 
 Brooke), who knew all he did in those days. 
 
 The real history of this writing for the Saturday Review 
 has much personal, pathetic, and literary interest. 
 
 It was when he was vicar of St. Philip's, Stepney, that he 
 wrote the most. The income of the place was, I think, 
 ^^300 a year, and the poverty of the parish was very great. 
 Mr. Green spent every penny of this income on the parish. 
 And he wrote in order to live, and often when he was 
 wearied out with the work of the day and late into the night 
 two, and often three, articles a week for the Saturday 
 Review. It was less of a strain to him than it would have 
 been to many others, because he wrote with such speed, and
 
 136 Biographical Studies 
 
 because his capacity for rapidly throwing his subject into 
 form and his memory were so remarkable. But it was a 
 severe strain, nevertheless, for one who, at the time, had in 
 him the beginnings of the disease of which he died. 
 
 I was staying with him once for two days, and the first 
 night he said to me, " I have three articles to write for the 
 Saturday Review, and they must all be done in thirty- six 
 hours." " What are they ? " I said ; " and how have you found 
 time to think of them ? " " Well," he answered, " one is on 
 a volume of Freeman's Norman Conquest, another is a ' light 
 middle,' and the last on the history of a small town in 
 England ; and I have worked them all into form as I was 
 walking to-day about the parish and in London." One of 
 these studies was finished before two o'clock in the morning, 
 and while I talked to him ; the other two were done the next 
 day. It is not uncommon to reach such speed, but it is very 
 uncommon to combine this speed with literary excellence of 
 composition, and with permanent and careful knowledge. 
 The historical reviews were of use to, and gratefully acknow- 
 ledged by, his brother historians, and frequently extended, in 
 two or three numbers of the Saturday Review, to the length 
 of an article in a magazine. I used to think them master- 
 pieces of reviewing, and their one fault was the fault which 
 was then frequent in that Revieiv over- vehemence in 
 slaughtering its foes. Such reviewing cannot be fairly 
 described as journalism. It was an historical scholar speaking 
 to scholars. 
 
 Another class of articles written by Mr. Green were articles 
 on towns in England, France, or Italy. I do not know 
 whether it was he or Mr. Freeman who introduced this 
 custom of bringing into a short space the historical aspect of 
 a single town or of a famous building, and showing how the 
 town or the building recorded its own history, and how, it 
 was linked to general history, but Mr. Green, at least, began 
 it very early in his articles on Oxford. At any rate, it was 
 his habit, at this time, whenever he travelled in England, 
 France, or Italy, to make a study of any town he visited. 
 
 Articles of this kind and he had them by fifties in his
 
 John Richard Green 137 
 
 head formed the second line of what has been called his 
 journalism. I should prefer to call them contributions to 
 history. They are totally different in quality from ordinary 
 journalism. They are short historical essays. 
 
 As his duties at Lambeth made no great 
 demands on his time, he was now able to devote 
 himself more steadily to historical work. His 
 first impulse in that direction seems, as I have 
 said, to have been received from Dean Stanley 
 at Oxford. His next came from E. A. Free- 
 man, who had been impressed by an ingenious 
 paper of his at a meeting of the Somerset 
 Archaeological Society, and who became from that 
 time his steadfast friend. Green was a born 
 historian, who would have been eminent without 
 any help except that of books. But he was wise 
 enough to know the value of personal counsel 
 and direction, and generous enough to be heartily 
 grateful for what he received. He did not belong 
 in any special sense to what has been called 
 Freeman's school, differing widely from that dis- 
 tinguished writer in many of his views, and still 
 more in style and manner. But he learnt much 
 from Freeman, and he delighted to acknowledge 
 his debt. He learnt among other things the value 
 of accuracy, the way to handle original authorities, 
 the interpretation of architecture, and he received, 
 during many years of intimate intercourse, the 
 constant sympathy and encouragement of a friend 
 whose affection was never blind to faults, while
 
 138 Biographical Studies 
 
 his admiration was never clouded by jealousy. 
 It was his good fortune to win the regard and 
 receive the advice of another illustrious historian, 
 Dr. Stubbs, who has expressed in language 
 perhaps more measured, but not less emphatic 
 than Freeman's, his sense of Green's services 
 to English history. These two he used to call 
 his masters ; but no one who has read him and 
 them needs to be told that his was one of those 
 strong and rich intelligences which, in becoming 
 more perfect by the study of others, loses nothing 
 of its originality. 
 
 His first continuous studies had lain among the 
 Angevin kings of England, and the note-books still 
 exist in which he had accumulated materials for 
 their history. However, the book he planned 
 was never written, for when the state of his lungs 
 (which forced him to spend the winter of 1870-71 
 at San Remo) had begun to alarm his friends, 
 they urged him to throw himself at once into 
 some treatise likely to touch the world more than 
 a minute account of so remote a period could 
 do. Accordingly he began, and in two or three 
 years, his winters abroad sadly interrupting work, 
 he completed the Short History of the English 
 People. When a good deal of it had gone 
 through the press, he felt, and his friends agreed 
 with him, that the style of the earlier chapters 
 was too much in the eager, quick, sketchy, 
 "point-making" manner of his Satitrday Revieiv
 
 John Richard Green 139 
 
 articles, "and did not possess" (says the friend 
 whom I have already quoted) "enough historical 
 dignity for a work which was to take in the whole 
 history of England. It was then, being convinced 
 of this, that he cancelled a great deal of what 
 had been stereotyped, and re-wrote it, re-creating, 
 with his passionate facility, his whole style." In 
 order to finish it he gave up the Saturday 
 Review altogether, though he could ill spare what 
 his writing there brought him in. It is seldom 
 that one finds such swiftness and ease in com- 
 position as his, united to so much fastidiousness. 
 He went on remoulding and revising till his 
 friends insisted that the book should be published 
 anyhow, and published it accordingly was, in 
 1874. Feeling that his time on earth might be 
 short, for he was often disabled even by a catarrh, 
 he was the readier to yield. 
 
 The success of the SJiort History was rapid 
 and overwhelming. Everybody bought it. It was 
 philosophical enough for scholars, and popular 
 enough for schoolboys. No historical book since 
 Macaulay's History has made its way so fast, or 
 been read with so much avidity. And Green was 
 under disadvantages from which his great pre- 
 decessor did not suffer. Macaulay's name was 
 famous before his History of England appeared, 
 and Macaulay's scale was so large that he could 
 enliven his pages with a multitude of anecdotes 
 and personal details. Green was known only to a
 
 140 Biographical Studies 
 
 small circle of friends, having written nothing under 
 his own signature except one or two papers in 
 magazines or in the Transactions of archaeological 
 societies ; and the plan of his book, which dealt, in 
 eight hundred and twenty pages, with the whole 
 fourteen centuries of English national life, obliged 
 him to handle facts in the mass, and touch 
 lightly and briefly on personal traits. A summary 
 is of all kinds of writing that which it is hardest 
 to make interesting, because one must speak 
 in general terms, one must pack facts tightly 
 together, one must be content to give those facts 
 without the delicacies of light and shade, or the 
 subtler tints of colour. Yet such was his skill, 
 both literary and historical, that his outlines gave 
 more pleasure and instruction than other people's 
 finished pictures. 
 
 In 1876 he took, for the only time in his life, 
 except when he had supported a working-man's 
 candidate for the Tower Hamlets at the general 
 election of 1868, an active part in practical 
 politics. Towards the end of that year, when 
 war seemed impending between Russia and 
 the Turks, fears were entertained that England 
 might undertake the defence of the Sultan, and 
 a body called the Eastern Question Association 
 was formed to organise opposition to the pro- 
 Turkish policy of Lord Beaconsfield's Ministry. 
 Green threw himself warmly into the movement, 
 was chosen to serve on the Executive Committee
 
 John Richard Green 141 
 
 of the Association, and was one of a sub-committee 
 of five (which included also Mr. Stopford Brooke 
 and Mr. William Morris the poet ^) appointed to 
 draw up the manifesto convoking the meeting of 
 delegates from all parts of the country, which was 
 held in December 1876, under the title of the 
 Eastern Question Conference. The sub-com- 
 mittee met at my house and spent the whole 
 day on its work. It was a new and curious 
 experience to see these three great men of 
 letters drafting a political appeal. Morris and 
 Green were both of them passionately anti- 
 Turkish, and Morris indeed acted for the next 
 two years as treasurer of the Association, doing 
 his work with a business-like efficiency such as 
 poets seldom possess. Green continued to attend 
 the general committee until, after the Treaty of 
 Berlin, it ceased to meet, and took the keenest 
 interest in its proceedings. But his weak health 
 and frequent winter absences made public ap- 
 pearances impossible to him. He was all his 
 life an ardent Liberal. His sympathy with 
 national movements did not confine itself to 
 Continental Europe, but embraced Ireland and 
 made him a Home Ruler long before Mr. 
 Gladstone and the Liberal party adopted that 
 policy. It ought to be added that though he 
 had ceased to belong to the Church of England, 
 he remained strongly opposed to disestablishment. 
 
 ' Sir Georsze \'oun<j and I were the other members.
 
 142 Biographical Studies 
 
 When he had completed the re-casting of his 
 Short History in the form of a larger book, which 
 appeared under the title of A History of the 
 English People, he addressed himself with char- 
 acteristic activity to a new project. He had for a 
 long time meditated upon the origines of English 
 history, the settlement of the Teutonic invaders 
 in Britain, followed by the consolidation of their 
 tribes into a nation with definite institutions and a 
 settled order ; and his desire to treat this topic 
 was stimulated by the way in which some critics 
 had sought to disparage his Short History 
 as a mere popularising of other people's ideas. 
 The criticism was unjust, for, if there had been 
 no rummaging in MS. sources for the Short 
 History, there was abundant originality in the 
 views the book contained. However, these 
 carpings disposed his friends to recommend an en- 
 terprise which would lead him to deal chiefly with 
 original authorities, and to put forth those powers 
 of criticism and construction which they knew him 
 to possess. Thus he set to work afresh at the 
 very beginning, at Roman Britain and the Saxon 
 Conquest. He had not advanced far when, having 
 gone to spend the winter in Egypt, he caught an 
 illness which so told on his weak frame that he was 
 only just able to return to London in April, and 
 would not have reached it at all but for the care 
 with which he was tended by his wife. (He had 
 married Miss Alice Stopford in 1877.) In a few
 
 John Richard Green 143 
 
 weeks he so far recovered as to be able to resume 
 his studies, though now forbidden to give to them 
 more than two or three hours a day. However, 
 what he could not do alone he did with and through 
 his wife, who consulted the original sources for 
 him, investigated obscure points, and wrote at 
 his dictation. In this way, during the summer 
 and autumn months of 1881, when often some 
 slight change of weather would throw him back 
 and make work impossible for days or weeks, 
 the book was prepared, which he published in 
 February 1882, under the title of The Making of 
 England. Even in those few months it was in- 
 cessantly rewritten ; no less than ten copies were 
 made of the first chapter. It was warmly received 
 by the few persons who were capable of judging 
 its merits. But he was himself far from satisfied 
 with it as a literary performance, thinking that a 
 reader would find it at once too speculative and 
 too dry, deficient in the details needed to make 
 the life of primitive England real and instructive. 
 If this had been so it would have been due to no 
 failing in his skill, but to the scantiness of the 
 materials available for the first few centuries of 
 our national history. But he felt it so strongly 
 that he was often disposed to recur to his idea of 
 writing a history of the last seventy or eighty 
 years, and was only induced by the encourage- 
 ment of a few friends to pursue the narrative 
 which, in The Making of England, he had carried
 
 144 Biographical Studies 
 
 down to the reign of Egbert. The winter of 1 88 1 
 was spent at Mentone, and the following summer 
 in London. He continued very weak, and was 
 sometimes unable for weeks together to go out 
 driving or to work at home. But the moment 
 that an access of strength returned, the note- 
 books were brought out, and he was again busy 
 going through what his wife's industry had 
 tabulated, and dictating for an hour or two till 
 fatigue forced him to desist. Those who saw 
 him during that summer were amazed, not only 
 at the brave spirit which refused to yield to 
 physical feebleness, but at the brightness and 
 clearness of his intellect, which was not only 
 as active as it had ever been before, but as 
 much interested in whatever passed in the world. 
 When one saw him sitting propped up with 
 cushions on the sofa, his tiny frame worn to 
 skin and bone, his voice interrupted by frequent 
 fits of coughing, it seemed wrong to stay, but, 
 after a little, all was forgotten in the fascina- 
 tion of his talk, and one found it hard to 
 realise that where thought was strong speech 
 might be weak. 
 
 In October, when he returned to Mentone, 
 the tale of early English history had been com- 
 pleted, and was in type down to the death of 
 Earl Godwine in a.d. 1052. He had hesitated 
 as to the point at which the book should end, 
 but finally decided to carry it down to a.d. 1085,
 
 John Richard Green 145 
 
 the date of the dispersion of the last great Scandi- 
 navian armament which threatened England. As 
 the book dealt with both the Danish and Norman 
 invasions, he called it The Conquest of England. 
 It appeared after his death, wanting, indeed, 
 those expansions in several places which he had 
 meant to give it, but still a book such as few but he 
 could have produced, full of new light, and equal 
 in the parts which have been fully handled to the 
 best work of his earlier years. 
 
 Soon after he returned to Mentone he became 
 rapidly worse, and unfit for any continuous exer- 
 tion. He could barely sit in the garden during 
 an hour or two of morning sunshine. There 
 I saw him in the end of December, fresh and 
 keen as ever, aware that the most he could 
 hope for was to live long enough to complete 
 his Compiest, but eagerly reading every new 
 book that came to him from England, starting 
 schemes for various historical treatises sufficient 
 to fill three life-times, and ranging in talk over 
 the whole field of politics, literature, and history. 
 It seemed as if the intellect and will, which strove 
 to remain till their work was done, were the only 
 things which held the weak and wasted body 
 together. The ardour of his spirit prolonged 
 life amid the signs of death. In January there 
 came a new attack, and in February another 
 unexpected rally. On the 2nd of March he 
 remarked that it was no use fighting longer,
 
 146 Biographical Studies 
 
 and expired five days afterwards at the age of 
 forty-six. 
 
 Short as his life was, maimed and saddened 
 by an ill- health which gave his powers no fair 
 chance, it was not an unhappy life, for he had 
 that immense power of enjoyment which so often 
 belongs to a vivacious intelligence. He delighted 
 in books, in travel, in his friends' company, in the 
 constant changes and movements of the world. 
 No satiety dulled his taste for these things, nor was 
 his spirit, except for passing moments, darkened 
 by the shadows which to others seemed to lie 
 so thick around his path. He enjoyed, though 
 without boasting, the fame his books had won, 
 and the sense of creative power. And the last 
 six years of his life were brightened by the 
 society and affection of one v/ho entered into 
 all his tastes and pursuits with the fullest 
 sympathy, and enabled him, by her unwearied 
 diligence, to prosecute labours which physical 
 weakness must otherwise have arrested. 
 
 He might have won fame as a preacher or as 
 a political journalist. It was, however, towards 
 historical study that the whole current of his 
 intellect set, and as it is by what he did in that 
 sphere that he will be remembered, his special 
 gifts for it deserve to be examined. 
 
 A historian needs four kinds of capacity. 
 First of all, accuracy, and a desire for the exact 
 truth, which will grudge no time and pains in
 
 John Richard Green 147 
 
 tracing out even what might seem a trivial 
 matter. Secondly, keen observation, which can 
 fasten upon small points, and discover in isolated 
 data the basis for some generalisation, or the 
 illustration of some principle. Thirdly, a sound 
 and calm judgment, which will subject all 
 inferences and generalisations, both one's own 
 and other people's, to a searching review, 
 and weigh in delicate scales their validity. 
 These two last- mentioned qualifications taken 
 together make up what we call the critical 
 faculty, i.e. the power of dealing with evidence 
 as tending to establish or discredit statements 
 of fact, and those general conclusions which 
 are built on the grouping of facts. Neither 
 acuteness alone nor the judicial balance alone is 
 enough to make the critic. There are men quick 
 in observation and fertile in suQfcrestion whose 
 conclusions are worthless, because they cannot 
 weigh one argument against another, just as 
 there are solid and well-balanced minds that 
 never enlighten a subject because, while detecting 
 the errors of others, they cannot combine the 
 data and propound a luminous explanation. To 
 the making of a true critic, in history, in philo- 
 sophy, in literature, in psychology, even largely 
 in the sciences of nature, there should go not only 
 judgment, but also a certain measure of creative 
 power. Fourthly, the historian must have imagi- 
 nation, not indeed with that intensit)- which
 
 148 Biographical Studies 
 
 makes the poet, but in sufficient volume to let him 
 feel the men of other ages and countries to be 
 living and real like those among whom he moves, 
 to present to him a large and full picture of a 
 world remote from himself in time as a world 
 moving, struggling, hoping, fearing, enjoying, be- 
 lieving, like the near world of to-day a world in 
 which there went on a private life of thousands or 
 millions of men and women, vaster, more complex, 
 more interesting than that public life which is 
 sometimes all that the records of the past have 
 transmitted to us. Our imaginative historian 
 may or may not be able to reconstruct for us the 
 private and personal as well as the public or 
 political life of the past. If he can, he will. If 
 the data are too scanty, he may cautiously for- 
 bear. Yet he will still feel that those whose 
 movements on the public stage he chronicles 
 were steeped in an environment of natural 
 and human influences which must have affected 
 them at every turn; and he will so describe 
 them as to make us feel them human, and give 
 life to the pallid figures of far-off warriors and 
 lawgivers. 
 
 To these four aptitudes one need hardly add 
 the faculty of literary exposition, for whoever 
 possesses in large measure the last three, or 
 even the last alone, cannot fail to interest his 
 readers ; and what more does literary talent 
 mean ?
 
 John Richard Green 149 
 
 Distinguishing these several aptitudes, his- 
 torians will be found to fall into two classes, 
 according as there predominates in them the 
 critical or the imaginative faculty. Though no 
 one can attain greatness without both gifts, still 
 they may be present in very unequal degrees. 
 Some will investigate tangible facts and their 
 relations with special care, occupying themselves 
 chiefly with that constitutional and diplomatic 
 side of history in which positive conclusions are 
 (from the comparative abundance of records) most 
 easily reached. Others will be drawn towards 
 the dramatic and personal elements in history, 
 primarily as they appear in the lives of famous 
 individual men, secondarily as they are seen, 
 more dimly but not less impressively, in groups 
 and masses of men, and in a nation at large, 
 and will also observe and dwell upon inci- 
 dents of private life or features of social and 
 religious custom, which the student of stately 
 politics passes by. 
 
 As Coleridge, when he divided thinkers into 
 two classes, took Plato as the type of one, Aristotle 
 of the other, so we may take as representatives of 
 these two tendencies among historians Thucydides 
 for the critical and philosophical, I lerodotus for the 
 iniaginative and picturesque. The former does not 
 indeed want a sense of the dramatic grandeur of a 
 situation ; his narrative of the later part of the 
 Athenian expedition against Syracuse is like a
 
 150 Biographical Studies 
 
 piece of ^schylus in prose. So too Herodotus 
 is by no means without a philosophical view of 
 things, nor without a critical instinct, although 
 his generalisations are sometimes vague or 
 fanciful, and his critical apparatus rudimentary. 
 Each is so splendid because each is wide, with 
 the great gifts largely, although not equally, 
 develooed. 
 
 Green was an historian of the Herodotean 
 type. He possessed capacities which belong to 
 the other type also ; he was critical, sceptical, 
 perhaps too sceptical, and philosophical. Yet 
 the imaginative quality was the leading and dis- 
 tinctive quality in his mind and writing. An 
 ordinary reader, if asked what was the main 
 impression given by the Short History of the 
 English People, would answer that it was the 
 impression of picturesqueness and vividity 
 picturesqueness in attention to the externals of 
 the life described, vividity in the presentation 
 of that life itself 
 
 I remember to have once, in talking with 
 Green about Greek history, told him how I 
 had heard Mr. Jowett, in discussing the ancient 
 historians, disparage Herodotus and declare him 
 unworthy to be placed near Thucydides. Green 
 answered, almost with indignation, that to say 
 such a thing showed that eminent scholars might 
 have little feeling for history. "Great as Thucy- 
 dides is," he said, " Herodotus is far greater, or
 
 John Richard Green 151 
 
 at any rate far more precious. His view was so 
 much wider." I forget the rest of the conversa- 
 tion, but what he meant was that Herodotus, to 
 whom everything in the world was interesting, 
 and who has told us something about every 
 country he visited or heard of, had a more fruitful 
 conception of history than his Athenian successor, 
 who practically confined himself to politics in the 
 narrower sense of the term, and that even the 
 wisdom of the latter is not so valuable to us as the 
 flood of miscellaneous information which Herodotus 
 pours out about everything in the early world a 
 world about which we should know comparatively 
 little if his book had not been preserved. 
 
 This deliverance was thoroughly characteristic 
 of Green's own view of history. Everything was 
 interesting to him because his imagination laid 
 hold of everything. When he travelled, nothing 
 escaped his quick eye, perpetually ranging over 
 the aspects of places and society. When he went 
 out to dinner, he noted every person present whom 
 he had not known before, and could tell you after- 
 wards something about them. He had a theory, 
 so to speak, about each of them, and indeed about 
 every one with whom he exchanged a dozen 
 words. When he read the newspaper, he seemed 
 to squeeze all the juice out of it in a few minutes. 
 Nor was it merely the large events that fixed his 
 mind ; he drew from stray notices of minor cur- 
 rent niatters evidence of principles or tendencies
 
 152 Biographical Studies 
 
 which escaped other people's eyes. You never 
 left him without having new light thrown upon 
 the questions of the hour. His memory was re- 
 tentive, but more remarkable was the sustained 
 keenness of apprehension with which he read, 
 and which made him fasten upon everything in 
 a book or in talk which was significant, and 
 could be made the basis for an illustration of 
 some view. He had the Herodotean quality of 
 reckoning nothing, however small or apparently 
 remote from the main studies of his life, to 
 be trivial or unfruitful. His imagination vitalised 
 the small things, and found a place for them 
 in the pictures he was always sketching out. 
 
 As this faculty of discerning hidden meanings 
 and relations was one index and consequence 
 of his imaginative power, so another was found 
 in that artistic gift to which I have referred. To 
 give literary form to everything was a necessity 
 of his intellect. He could not tell an anecdote 
 or repeat a conversation without unconsciously 
 dramatising it, putting into people's mouths better 
 phrases than they would have themselves em- 
 ployed, and giving a finer point to the moral 
 which the incident expressed. Verbal accuracy 
 suffered, but what he thought the inner truth 
 came out the more fully. 
 
 Though he wrote very fast, and in the most 
 familiar way, the style of his more serious letters 
 was as good, I might say as finished, as that of his
 
 John Richard Green 153 
 
 books. Every one of them had a beginning, 
 middle, and end. The ideas were developed in an 
 apt and graceful order, the sentences could all be 
 construed, the diction was choice. It was the 
 same with the short articles which he at one time 
 used to write for the Saturday Revieiv. They 
 are little essays, some of them worthy to live not 
 only for the excellent matter they contain, but 
 for the delicate refinement of their form. Yet 
 they were all written swiftly, and sometimes in 
 the midst of physical exhaustion. The friend I 
 have previously quoted describes the genesis of 
 one. Green had reached the town of Troyes 
 early one morning with two companions, and 
 immediately started off to explore it, darting 
 hither and thither through the streets like a dog 
 trying to find a scent. In two or three hours the 
 examination was complete. The friends lunched 
 together, took the train on to Basel, got there 
 late, and went off to bed. Green, however, wrote 
 before he slept, and laid on the breakfast-table 
 next morning, an article on Troyes, in which its 
 characteristic features were brouQ-ht out and con- 
 nected with its fortunes and those of the Counts 
 of Champagne during some centuries, an article 
 'vhich was really a history in miniature. Then they 
 went out too-ether to look at Basel, and beincf asked 
 some question about that city he o-ave on the spur 
 of the moment a sketch of its growth and character 
 equally vivid and equally systematic, grouping all
 
 154 Biographical Studies 
 
 he had to say round two or three leading theories. 
 Yet he had never been in either place before, and 
 had not made a special study of either. He could 
 apparently have done the same for many another 
 town in France or the Rhineland. 
 
 Nothing struck one so much in daily inter- 
 course with him as his passionate interest in 
 human life. The same quickness of sympathy 
 which had served him well in his work among 
 the East End poor, enabled him to pour feeling 
 into the figures of a bygone age, and become 
 the most human, and in so far the most real and 
 touching, of all who have dealt with English 
 history. Whether or not his portraits are true, 
 they always seem to breathe. 
 
 Men and women that is to say, such of them 
 as have characteristics pronounced enough to 
 make them classifiable may be divided into 
 those whose primary interests are in nature and 
 what relates to nature, and those whose primary 
 interests are in and for man. Green was the most 
 striking type I have known of the latter class, 
 not merely because his human interests were 
 strong, but also because they excluded, to a 
 degree singular in a mind so versatile, interests 
 in purely natural things. He did not seem to 
 care for or seek to know any of the sciences of 
 nature^ except in so far as they bore directly 
 
 1 At one time, however, he learnt a little geology from his friend 
 Professor Dawkins, perceiving its bearings on history.
 
 John Richard Green 155 
 
 upon man's life, and were capable of explaining 
 it or of serving it. He had a keen eye for 
 country, for the direction and character of hills, 
 the position and influence of rivers, forests, and 
 marshes, of changes in the line of land and sea. 
 Readers of The Making of England will recall 
 the picture of the physical aspects of B itain when 
 the Teutonic invaders entered it as an unsur- 
 passed piece of reconstructive description. So 
 on a battle-field or in an historical town, his 
 vision of the features of the ground or the site 
 was unerring. But he perceived and enjoyed 
 natural beauty chiefly in reference to human life. 
 The study of the battle-field and the town site 
 were aids to the comprehension of historical 
 events. The exquisite landscape was exquisite 
 because it was associated with the people dwelling 
 there, with the processes of their political growth, 
 with their ideas or their social usages, I re- 
 member to have had from him the most vivid 
 descriptions of the towns of the Riviera and 
 of Capri, where he used to pass the winter, but 
 he never touched on anything which did not 
 illustrate or intertwine itself with the life of the 
 people, leaving one uninformed on matters purely 
 physical. Facts about the character of the 
 mountains, the relation of their ranges to one 
 another, or their rocks, or the trees and flowers 
 of their upper regions, the prospects their 
 summits command, the scenes of beauty in their
 
 156 Biographical Studies 
 
 glens, or beside their wood - embosomed lakes, 
 all, in fact, which the mountain lover delights 
 in, and which are to him a part of the mountain 
 ardour, of the passion for pure nature unsullied 
 by the presence of man all this was cold to 
 him. But as soon as a touch of human life fell 
 like a sunbeam across the landscape, all became 
 warm and lovable. 
 
 It was the same with art. With an historian's 
 delight in the creative ages and their work, he 
 had a fondness for painting and sculpture, and 
 could so describe what he saw in the galleries and 
 churches of Italy as to bring out meanings one 
 had not perceived before. But here, too, it was 
 the human element that fascinated him. Technical 
 merits, though he observed them, as he observed 
 most things, were forgotten ; he dwelt only on 
 what the picture expressed or revealed. Pure 
 landscape painting gave him little pleasure. 
 
 It seems a truism to say that one who writes 
 history ought to care for all that bears upon 
 man in the present in order that he may com- 
 prehend what bore upon him in the past. This 
 roaring loom of Time, these complex physical 
 and moral forces playing round us, and driving 
 us hither and thither by such a strange and 
 intricate interlacement of movements that we 
 seem to perceive no more than what is next us, 
 and are unable to say v/hither we are tending, 
 ought to be always before the historian's mind.
 
 John Richard Green 157 
 
 But there are few who have tried, as Green 
 tried, to follow every flash of the shuttle, and to 
 discover a direction and a relation amidst appar- 
 ent confusion, for there are few who have taken 
 so wide a view of the historian's functions, and 
 have so distinctly set before them as their object 
 the comprehension and realisation and descrip- 
 tion of the whole field of bygone human life. 
 The Past was all present to him in this sense, 
 that he saw and felt in it not only those large 
 events which annalists or state papers have re- 
 corded, but the everyday life of the people, their 
 ideas, their habits, their external surroundings. 
 And the Present was always as if past to him 
 in this sense, that in spite of his strong political 
 feelings, he looked eit it with the eye of a 
 philosophical observer, trying to disengage prin- 
 ciples from details, permanent tendencies from 
 passing outbursts. His imagination visualised, 
 so to speak, the phenomena as in a picture ; his 
 speculative faculty tried to harmonise them, 
 measure them, and forecast their effects. Hence 
 it was a necessity to him to know what was 
 passing in the world. The first thing he did 
 every day, whatever other pressure there might 
 be on him, was to read the daily newspaper. 
 The last thing that he ceased to read, when what 
 remained of life began to be counted by hours, 
 was the daily newspaper. This warm interest in 
 mankind is the keynote of his History of the
 
 158 Biographical Studies 
 
 English People. It is the whole people that is 
 ever present to him, as it had been present before 
 to few other historians. 
 
 Such power of imagination and sympathy as I 
 have endeavoured to describe is enough to make 
 a brilliant writer, yet not necessarily a great 
 historian. One must see how far the other 
 qualifications, accuracy, acuteness of observation, 
 and judgment, are also brought into action. 
 
 His accuracy has been much impeached. When 
 the first burst of applause that welcomed the 
 Short History had subsided, several critics began 
 to attack it on the score of minor errors. They 
 pointed out a number of statements of fact which 
 were doubtful, and others which were incorrect, 
 and spread in some quarters the impression that 
 Green was a careless and untrustworthy writer. 
 I do not deny that there are in the first editions 
 of the Short History some assertions made 
 more positively than the evidence warrants, 
 some pictures drawn from exceedingly slender 
 materials. Mr. Skene remarks of the account 
 given of the battle between the Jutes and the 
 Britons which took place in the middle of the fifth 
 century, somewhere near Aylesford in Kent, and 
 about which we really know scarcely anything, 
 "Mr. Green describes it as if he had been present." 
 The temptation to such liberties is strong where 
 the treatment of a period is summary. A writer 
 who compresses the whole history of England
 
 John Richard Green 159 
 
 into eight hundred pages of small octavo, making 
 his narrative not a bare narrative but a picture 
 full of colour and incident incident which, for 
 brevity's sake, must often be given by allusion 
 cannot be always interrupting the current of the 
 story to indicate doubts or quote authorities for 
 every statement in which there may be an 
 element of conjecture ; and it is probable that 
 when the authorities are scrutinised their result 
 will sometimes appear different from that which 
 the author has presented. On this head the 
 Short History may be admitted to have occasion- 
 ally purchased vividity at the price of exactitude. 
 Of mistakes, strictly so called i.e. statements 
 demonstrably incorrect and therefore ascribable 
 to haste or carelessness there are enough to 
 make a show under the hands of a hostile critic, 
 yet not more than one is prepared to expect 
 from any but the most careful scholars. The 
 book falls far short of the accuracy of Thirlwall 
 or Ranke or Stubbs, short even of the accuracy 
 of Gibbon or Carlyle ; but it is not greatly 
 below the standard of Grote or jMacaulay or 
 Robertson, it is equal to the standard of Milman, 
 above that of David Hume. I take famous 
 names, and could put a better face on the matter 
 by choosing for comparison divers contemporary 
 writers whose literary eminence is higher than 
 their historical. And Green's mistakes, although 
 pretty numerous, were (for they have been cor-
 
 i6o Biographical Studies 
 
 rected in later editions) nearly all in small matters. 
 He puts an event, let us say, in 1340 which 
 happened in the November of 1339; he calls a 
 man John whose name was William. These are 
 mistakes to the eye of a civil service examiner, 
 but they seldom make any difference to the 
 general reader, for they do not affect the doctrines 
 and pictures which the book contains, and in 
 which lies its permanent value as well as its literary 
 charm. As Bishop Stubbs says, " Like other 
 people, Green makes mistakes sometimes ; but 
 scarcely ever does the correction of his mistakes 
 affect either the essence of the picture or the 
 force of the argument. . . , All his work was 
 real and original work ; few people besides those 
 who knew him well would see under the charming 
 ease and vivacity of his style the deep research 
 and sustained industry of the laborious student." 
 It may be added that Green's later and more 
 detailed works, The Making of Engla7id and 
 The Conquest of England, though they contain 
 plenty of debatable matter, as in the paucity 
 of authentic data any such book must do, have 
 been charged with few errors in matters of 
 fact. 
 
 In considering his critical gift, it is well to dis- 
 tinguish those two elements of acute perception 
 and sober judgment which I have already specified, 
 for he possessed the former in larger measure than 
 the latter. The same activity of mind which made
 
 John Richard Green i6i 
 
 him notice everything while travelHng or enter- 
 ing a company of strangers, played incessantly 
 upon the historical data of his work, and supplied 
 him with endless theories as to the meaning of 
 a statement, the source it came from, the way it 
 had been transmitted, the conditions under which 
 it was made. No one could be more acute and 
 penetrating in what the Germans call Quelle?i- 
 forsckiiug, the collection and investigation and 
 testing of the sources of history, nor could any 
 one be more painstaking. Errors of view, apart 
 from those trivial inaccuracies already referred to, 
 did not arise from an indolence that left any 
 stone unturned, but rather from an occupation 
 with the leading idea which had drawn his 
 attention away from the details of time and place. 
 The ingenuity with which he built up theories 
 was as admirable as the art with which he 
 stated them. People whom that art fascinated 
 sometimes fancied that the charm lay entirely in 
 the style. But the style was only a part of the 
 craftsmanship. The facility in theorising, the 
 power of grouping facts under new aspects, the 
 skill in gathering and sifting evidence, were 
 as remarkable as those artistic qualities which 
 expressed themselves in the paragraphs and 
 sentences and phrases. What danger there was 
 arose from this fecundity. His mind was so 
 fertile, could see so much in a theory and apply 
 
 it so dexterously, that his judgment was some- 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Biographical Studies 
 
 times dazzled by the brilliance of his ingenuity. 
 I do not think he loved his theories specially 
 because they were his own, for he often modified 
 them, and was ready to consider any one else's 
 suggestions ; but he had a passion for light, and 
 when a new view seemed to him to explain things 
 previously dark, he wanted the patience to sus- 
 pend his judgment and abide in uncertainty. 
 Some of his hypotheses he himself dropped. 
 Some others he probably would have dropped, 
 as the authorities he respected have not embraced 
 them. Others have made their way into general 
 acceptance, and may become still more useful as 
 future research works them out. But, whether 
 right or wrong, they were instructive. Every 
 one of them is based upon facts whose im- 
 portance had not been so fully seen before, and 
 suggests a point of view worth considering. 
 Green's view may sometimes appear fanciful : it 
 is never foolish, or superficial, or perverse. And 
 so far from being credulous, his natural tendency 
 was towards doubt. 
 
 Inventive as his mind was, it was also solvent 
 and sceptical. Seldom is a strong imagination 
 coupled with so unsparing a criticism as that 
 which he applied to the materials on which the 
 constructive faculty had to work. His later 
 tendencies were rather towards scepticism, and 
 towards what one may call a severe and ascetic 
 view of history. While writing The Making of
 
 John Richard Green 163 
 
 England and The Conqziesi of England, he used 
 to lament the scantiness of the data and the 
 barren dryness which he feared the books would 
 consequently show. " How am I to make any- 
 thing of these meagre entries of marches and 
 battles which are the only materials for the history 
 of whole centuries ? Here are the Norsemen 
 and Danes ravaging and occupying the country ; 
 we learn hardly anything about them from English 
 sources, and nothing at all from Danish. How 
 can one conceive and describe them ? how have 
 any comprehension of what England was like in 
 the districts the Northmen took and ruled ? " I 
 tried to get him to work at the Norse Sagas, and 
 remember in particular to have entreated him 
 when he came to the battle of Brunanburh to 
 eke out the pitifully scanty records of that fight 
 from the account given of it in the story of 
 the Icelandic hero, Egil, son of Skallagrim. 
 But he answered that the Saga was unhistorical, 
 a bit of legend written down more than a 
 century after the events, and that he could not, 
 by using it in the text, appear to trust it, or to 
 mix up authentic history with what was possibly 
 fable. It was urged that he could guard him- 
 self in a note from being supposed to take it 
 for more than what it was, a most picturesque 
 embellishment of his tale. But he stood firm. 
 Throughout these two last books, he steadily 
 refrained from introducing any matter, however
 
 164 Biographical Studies 
 
 lively or romantic, which could not stand the 
 test of his stringent criticism, and used laughingly 
 to tell how Dean Stanley had long ago said to 
 him, after reading one of his earliest pieces, " I 
 see you are in danger of growing picturesque. 
 Beware of it. I have suffered for it." 
 
 If in these later years he reined in his 
 imagination more tightly, the change was due 
 to no failing in his ingenuity. Nothing in 
 his work shows higher constructive ability than 
 The Making of Engla7id. He had to deal 
 with a time which has left us scarcely any 
 authentic records, and to piece together his nar- 
 rative and his picture of the country out of these 
 records, and the indications, faint and scattered, 
 and often capable of several interpretations, which 
 are supplied by the remains of Roman roads and 
 villas, the names of places, the boundaries of local 
 divisions, the casual statements of writers many 
 centuries later. What he has given us remains 
 an enduring witness to his historical power. 
 For here it is not a question of mere brilliance 
 of style. The result is due to patience, pene- 
 tration, and the careful weighing of evidence, 
 joined to that faculty of realising things in 
 the concrete by which a picture is conjured up 
 out of a mass of phenomena, everything falling 
 into its place under laws which seem to prove 
 themselves as soon as they are stated. 
 
 Of his style nothing need be said, for his
 
 John Richard Green 165 
 
 readers have felt its charm. But it deserves 
 to be remarked that this accomplished master 
 of words had little verbal memory. He used 
 to say that he could never recollect a phrase in 
 its exact form, and in his books he often uncon- 
 sciously varied, writing from memory, some ex- 
 pression whose precise form is on record. Nor 
 had he any turn for languages. German he knew 
 scarcely at all, a fact which makes the range of his 
 historical knowledge appear more striking ; and 
 though he had spent several winters in Italy, he 
 could not speak Italian except so far as he 
 needed it for the inn or the railway. The want 
 of mere verbal memory partly accounts for this 
 deficiency, but it was not unconnected with the 
 vehemence of his interest in the substance of 
 things. He was so anxious to get at the kernel 
 that he could not stop to examine the nut. In 
 this absence of linguistic gifts, as well as in the 
 keenness of his observation (and in his short- 
 sightedness), he resembled Dean Stanley, who, 
 though he had travelled in and brought back all 
 that was best worth knowing from every country 
 in Europe, had no facility in any language but his 
 own. 
 
 Green was not one of those whose personality 
 is unlike their books, for there was in both the 
 same fertility, the same vivacity, the same quick- 
 ness of sympathy. Nevertheless, his conversa- 
 tion seemed to give an even higher impression
 
 1 66 Biographical Studies 
 
 of intellectual power than did his writings, 
 because it was so swift and so spontaneous. 
 Such talk has rarely been heard in our time, so 
 gay was it, so vivid, so various, so full of anec- 
 dote and illustration, so acute in criticism, so 
 candid in consideration, so graphic in descrip- 
 tion, so abundant in sympathy, so flashing in 
 insight, so full of colour and emotion as well as 
 of knowledge and thought. One had to forbid 
 one's self to visit him in the evening, because 
 it was impossible to get away before two o'clock 
 in the morning. And, unlike many famous 
 talkers, he was just as willing to listen as to 
 speak. One of the charms of his company 
 was that it made a man feel better than his 
 ordinary self. His appreciation of whatever had 
 any worth in it, his comments and replies, 
 so stimulated the interlocutor's mind that it 
 moved faster and could hit upon apter ex- 
 pressions than at any other time. The same 
 gifts which shone in his conversation, lucid 
 arrangement of ideas, ready command of words, 
 and a power in perceiving the tendencies of 
 those whom he addressed, would have made 
 him an admirable public speaker. I do not 
 remember that he ever did speak, in his later 
 years, to any audience larger than a committee 
 of twenty. But he was an eloquent preacher. 
 The first time I ever saw him was in St. Philip's 
 Church at Stepney about 1866, and I shall never
 
 John Richard Green 167 
 
 forget the impression made on me by the im- 
 passioned sentences that rang through the church 
 from the fiery Httle figure in the pulpit with its 
 thin face and bright black eyes. 
 
 What Green accomplished seems to those who 
 ased to listen to him little in comparison with 
 \^'hat he might have done had longer life and a 
 n^ore robust body been granted him. Some of 
 his finest gifts would not have found their full 
 scope till he came to treat of a period where the 
 materials for history are ample, and where he 
 cou'd have allowed himself space to deal with 
 them such a period, for instance, as that of his 
 eary choice, the Angevin kings of England. 
 Yet even basing themselves on what he has 
 done, they may claim for him a place among the 
 forenost writers of his time. He left behind him 
 no ore who combined so many of the best gifts. 
 There were among his contemporaries historians 
 more learned and equally industrious. There were 
 two or three whose accuracy was more scrupulous, 
 their jidgment more uniformly sober and cautious. 
 But there was no one in whom so much know- 
 ledge aid so wide a range of interests were united 
 to such ingenuity, acuteness, and originality, as 
 well as to such a power of presenting results in 
 rich, cleir, pictorial language. A master of style 
 may be c worthless historian. We have instances. 
 A skilful investigator and sound reasoner may be 
 unreadabe. The conjunction of fine gifts for
 
 1 68 Biographical Studies 
 
 investigation with fine gifts for exposition is a 
 rare conjunction, which cannot be prized too 
 highly, for while it advances historical science, it 
 brines historical methods, as well as historical 
 facts, within the horizon of the ordinary reader. 
 
 Of the services Green rendered to English 
 history, the first, and that which was most 
 promptly appreciated, was the intensity witi 
 which he realised, and the skill with which he 
 portrayed, the life of the people of England as 
 a whole, and taught his readers that the exploits 
 of kings and the intrigues of ministers, and the 
 struggles of parties in Parliament, are, after all, 
 secondary matters, and important chiefly as tiey 
 aftect the welfare or stimulate the thoughts and 
 feelings of the great mass of undistinguished 
 humanity in whose hands the future of a nition 
 lies. He changed the old-fashioned distribution 
 of our annals according to reigns and dyrasties 
 into certain periods, showing that such di^isions 
 often obscure the true connection of even's, and 
 suggesting new and better conceptions d( the 
 periods into which the record of English pjogress 
 naturally falls. And. lastly, he laid, in hii latest 
 books, a firm and enduring foundation for our 
 mediaeval history by that account of the leutonic 
 occupation of England, of the state of thecountry 
 as they found it, and the way they conquered and 
 began to organise it, which I have already dwelt 
 on as a signal proof of his constructive faculty.
 
 John Richard Green 169 
 
 Many readers will be disposed to place him 
 near Macaulay, for though he was less weighty 
 he was more subtle, and not less fascinating. To 
 fewer perhaps will it occur to compare him with 
 Gibbon, yet I am emboldened by the opinion 
 of one of our greatest contemporary historians 
 to note some points of resemblance. There are 
 indeed wide differences between the two. Green 
 is as completely a man of the nineteenth century 
 as Gibbon was a man of the eighteenth. Green's 
 style has not the majestic march of Gibbon : it 
 is quick and eager almost to restlessness. Nor 
 is his judgment so uniformly grave and sound. 
 But one may find in his genius what was 
 characteristic of Gibbon's also, the combination 
 of a mastery of multitudinous details, with a large 
 and luminous view of those far-reaching forces 
 and relations which govern the fortunes of peoples 
 and guide the course of empire. This width and 
 comprehensiveness, this power of massing for the 
 purposes of argument the facts which his literary 
 art has just been clothing in its most brilliant 
 hues, is the highest of a historian's gifts, and is 
 the one which seems most surely to establish 
 Green's position among the leading historical 
 minds of his time.
 
 SIR GEORGE JESSEL, MASTER OF 
 THE ROLLS 
 
 There is hardly any walk of English life in 
 which brilliant abilities win so little fame for 
 their possessor among the public at large as 
 that of practice at the Chancery bar. A 
 leading ecclesiastic, or physician, or surgeon, 
 or financier, or manufacturer, or even a great 
 man of science, unless his work is done in some 
 sphere which, like pure mathematics, is far 
 removed from the comprehension of ordinary 
 educated men, is sure, in a time like ours, to 
 become well known to the world and acquire 
 influence in it. A great advocate practising in 
 the Common-law Courts is, of course, still more 
 certain to become a familiar figure. But the cases 
 which are dealt with by the Courts of Equity, 
 though they often involve vast sums of money 
 and raise intricate and important points of 
 law, mostly turn on questions of a technical 
 kind, and are seldom what the newspapers call 
 sensational. Thus it may happen that a practi- 
 tioner or a judge in these Courts enjoys an 
 
 170
 
 Sir George Jessel 171 
 
 extraordinary reputation within his profession, 
 and is by them regarded as one of the ornaments 
 of his time, while the rest of his fellow-countrymen 
 know nothing at all about his merits. 
 
 This was the case with Sir George Jessel, 
 though towards the end of his career the admira- 
 tion which the Bar felt for his powers began so 
 far to filter through to the general public that 
 his premature death was felt to be a national 
 misfortune. 
 
 Jessel (born in 1824, died in 1883) was only 
 one among many instances England has lately 
 seen of men of Jewish origin climbing to the 
 highest distinction. But he was the first instance 
 of a Jew who, continuing to adhere to the creed of 
 his forefathers, received a very high office ; for Mr. 
 Disraeli, as every one knows, had been baptized 
 as a boy, and always professed to be a Christian, 
 Jessel's career was not marked by any remarkable 
 incidents. He soon obtained practice at the bar, 
 and after a time began to rise quickly. His 
 powers were still more fully seen and appreciated 
 when he became (in 1865) a Queen's Counsel, 
 and brought him with unusual speed to the front 
 rank. He came into Parliament at the general 
 election of 1868 on the Liberal side, and three 
 years later was made Solicitor-General in Mr. 
 Gladstone's first Government, retaining, as was 
 then usual, his private practice, which had be- 
 come so large that there was scarcely any case of
 
 172 Biographical Studies 
 
 first-rate importance brought into the Chancery- 
 Courts in which he did not appear. Although 
 a decided Liberal, as the Jews mostly were 
 until Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy had 
 begun to lead them into other paths, he had 
 borne little part in politics till he took his 
 seat in the House of Commons ; and when 
 he spoke there, he obtained no great success. 
 Lawyers in the English Parliament are under 
 the double disadvantage of having had less leisure 
 than most other members to study and follow 
 political questions, and of having contracted a 
 manner and style of speaking not suited to an 
 assembly which, though deliberative, is not de- 
 liberate, and which listens with impatience to a 
 technical or forensic methcd of treating the topics 
 which come before it. 
 
 Jessel's ability would have soon overcome 
 the former difficulty, but less easily the latter. 
 Though he was lucid and powerful in his treat- 
 ment of legal topics, and made a quite admirable 
 law officer in the way of advising ministers and 
 the public departments, he was never popular 
 with the House of Commons, for he presented 
 his views in a hard, dry, dogmatic form, with no 
 graces of style or delivery. However, he did 
 not long remain in that arena, but on the retire- 
 ment of Lord Romilly from the office of Master 
 of the Rolls, was in 1873 appointed to succeed him. 
 In this post his extraordinary gifts found their
 
 Sir George Jessel 173 
 
 amplest sphere. The equity judges in England 
 had theretofore always sat, and now practically 
 always sit, without a jury to hear causes, with or 
 without witnesses, and they despatch a great deal 
 of the heaviest business that is brought into the 
 courts. Commercial causes of the first importance 
 come before them, no less than those which relate 
 to trusts or to real property ; and the granting of 
 injunctions, a specially serious matter, rests chierty 
 in their hands. Each equity judge sits alone, and 
 the suitor could in those days choose before which 
 of them he would bring his case. Among the 
 four a number subsequently increased to six 
 equity judges of first instance, Jessel immediately 
 rose to the highest reputation, so that most of the 
 heavy and difficult cases were brought into his 
 court. He possessed a wonderfully quick, as well 
 as powerful, mind, which got to the kernel of a 
 matter while other people were still hammering 
 at the shell, and which applied legal principles 
 just as swiftly and surely as it mastered a group 
 of complicated facts. 
 
 The Rolls Court used to present, while he 
 presided over it, a curious and interesting sight, 
 which led young counsel, who had no business 
 to do there, to frequent it for the mere sake of 
 watching the Judge. When the leading counsel 
 for the plaintiff was opening his case, Jessel 
 listened quietly for the first few minutes only, 
 and then began to address questions to the
 
 174 Biographical Studies 
 
 counsel, at first so as to guide his remarks in a 
 particular direction, then so as to stop his course 
 altogether and turn his speech into a series of 
 answers to the Judge's interrogatories. When, 
 by a short dialogue of this kind, Jessel had 
 possessed himself of the vital facts, he would 
 turn to the leading counsel for the defendant 
 and ask him whether he admitted such and such 
 facts alleged by the plaintiff to be true. If these 
 facts were admitted, the Judge proceeded to 
 indicate the view he was disposed to take of the 
 law applicable to the facts, and, by a few more 
 questions to the counsel on the one side or the 
 other, as the case might be, elicited their re- 
 spective legal grounds of contention. If the facts 
 were not admitted, it of course became neces- 
 sary to call the witnesses or read the affidavits, 
 processes which the vigorous impatience of 
 the Judge considerably shortened, for it was a 
 dangerous thing to read to him any irrelevant 
 or loosely-drawn paragraph. But more generally 
 his searching questions and the sort of pressure 
 he applied so cut down the issues of fact that 
 there was little or nothing left in controversy 
 regarding which it was necessary to examine the 
 evidence in detail, since the counsel felt that 
 there was no use in putting before him a conten- 
 tion which they could not sustain under the fire 
 of his criticism. Then Jessel proceeded to deliver 
 his opinion and dispose of the case. The affair
 
 Sir George Jessel 175 
 
 was from beginning to end far less an argument 
 and counter-argument by counsel than an in- 
 vestigation directly conducted by the Judge him- 
 self, in which the principal function of the counsel 
 was to answer the Judge's questions concisely 
 and exactly, so that the latter might as soon as 
 possible get to the bottom of the matter. The 
 Bar in a little while came to learn and adapt 
 themselves to his ways, and few complained of 
 being stopped or interrupted by him, because 
 his interruptions, unlike those of some judges, 
 were neither inopportune nor superfluous. The 
 counsel (with scarcely an exception) felt them- 
 selves his inferiors, and recognised not only that 
 he was better able to handle the case than they 
 were, but that the manner and style in which they 
 presented their facts or arguments would make 
 little difference to the result, because his penetra- 
 tion was sure to discover the merits of each con- 
 tention, and neither eloquence nor pertinacity 
 would have the slightest effect on his resolute 
 and self-confident mind. Thus business w^as 
 despatched before him with unexampled speed, 
 and it became a maxim among barristers that, 
 however low down in the cause -list at the 
 Rolls your cause might stand, it was never 
 safe to be away from the court, so rapidly 
 were cases "crumpled up" or "broken down' 
 under the blows of this vigorous intellect. 
 It was more surprising that the suitors, as well
 
 176 Biographical Studies 
 
 as the Bar and the pubHc generally, acquiesced, 
 after the first few months, in this way of 
 doing business. Nothing breeds more dis- 
 content than haste and heedlessness in a judge. 
 But Jessel's speed was not haste. He did as 
 much justice in a day as others could do in a 
 week ; and those few who, dissatisfied with these 
 rapid methods, tried to reverse his decisions before 
 the Court of Appeal, were very seldom successful, 
 although that court then contained in Lord Justice 
 James and Lord Justice Mellish two unusually 
 strong men, who would not have hesitated to 
 differ even from the redoubtable Master of the 
 Rolls. 
 
 As I have mentioned Lord Justice Mellish, I 
 may turn aside for a moment to say a word re- 
 garding that extraordinary man, who stood along 
 with Cairns and Roundell Palmer in the fore- 
 most rank of Jessel's professional contemporaries. 
 Mellish held for some years before his elevation 
 to the Bench in 1869 a position unique at the 
 English Common-law Bar as a giver of opinions 
 on points of law. As the Israelites in King 
 David's day said of Ahithophel that his counsel 
 was as if a man had inquired at the oracle of 
 God,^ so the legal profession deemed Mellish 
 practically infallible, and held an opinion signed 
 by him to be equal in weight to a judgment of 
 the Court of Exchequer Chamber (the then court 
 
 ' 2 Sam. xvi. 23.
 
 Sir George Jessel 177 
 
 of appeal in common-law cases). He was not 
 effective as an advocate addressing a jury, being 
 indeed far too good for any jury; but in arguing 
 a point of law his unerring logic, the lucidity 
 with which he stated his position, the cogency 
 and precision with which he drew his inferences, 
 made it a delight to listen to him. The chain of 
 ratiocination seemed irrefragable : 
 
 ev 8' WiT ciKjiod^TM fxeyav aKjj.ova, k6~T 8e Secrfiov^ 
 dpprjKTov^ aAvTous, 6(jip efxeSov avdi fievouv.^ 
 
 He had, indeed, but one fault as an arguer. 
 He could not argue a point whose soundness he 
 doubted as effectively as one in which he had 
 faith ; and when it befell that several points arose 
 in a case, and the Court seemed disposed to lay 
 more stress on the one for which he cared little 
 than on the one he deemed conclusive, he refused 
 to fall in with their view and continued to insist 
 upon that which his own mind approved. 
 
 I remember to have once heard him and 
 Cairns argue before the House of Lords (sitting 
 as the final Court of Appeal) a case relating 
 to a vessel called the Alexand^'a it was a case 
 arising out of an attempt of the Contederates, 
 during the American War of Secession, to get 
 out of a British port a cruiser they had ordered. 
 
 1 Odyss. viii. 274: "And upon the anvil-stand he set tb.e niii^luy 
 anvil ; and he forged the links that could be neither broken nor loosed, so 
 that they should stay firm in their place. '" 
 
 N
 
 lyS Biographical Studies 
 
 Cairns spoke first with all his usual power, and 
 seemed to have left nothing to be added. But 
 when Mellish followed on the same side, he set 
 his points in so strong a light, and placed his 
 contention on so solid a basis, that even Cairns's 
 speech was forgotten, and it seemed impossible 
 that any answer could be found to Mellish's 
 arguments. One felt as if the voice of pure 
 reason were speaking th'-ough his lips. 
 
 Such an intellect might seem admirably quali- 
 fied for judicial work. But as a judge, Mellish, 
 admirable though he was in temper, in fairness, 
 in learning, and in logic, did not win so exceptional 
 a reputation as he had won at the Bar. People used 
 to ascribe this partly to his weak health, partly 
 to the fact that he, who had been a common-law 
 practitioner, was sitting in a court which heard 
 equity appeals, and alongside of a quick and 
 strong colleague reared in the equity courts.^ 
 But something may have been due to the fact 
 that he needed the stimulus of conflict to brinpf 
 out the full force of his splendid intelligence. 
 A circumstance attending the appointment of 
 Mellish illustrates the remark already made 
 that a great counsel whose work lies apart 
 from so-called "sensation cases" may remain 
 
 ^ I^ord Justice James said of his colleague that he had only one 
 defect as a judge : "lie was too anxious to convince counsel that they 
 were wrong, when he thought their coniention unsound, seeming to 
 forget that counsel are paid not to be convinced."
 
 Sir George Jessel 179 
 
 unknown to his contemporaries. Wlien Mr. 
 Gladstone, being then Prime Minister, and 
 having to select a Lord Justice of Appeal, 
 was told that Mellish was the fittest man for 
 the post, he asked, "Can that be the boy 
 who was my fag at Eton?" He had not 
 heard of Mellish during the intervening forty 
 years ! 
 
 However, I return to the Master of the Rolls. 
 In dealing with facts, Jessel has never had a 
 superior, and in our days, perhaps, no rival. He 
 knew all the ways of the financial and commercial 
 world. In his treatment of points of law, every 
 one admitted and admired both an extraordinary 
 knowledge and mastery of reported cases, and 
 an extremely acute and exact appreciation of 
 principles, a complete power of extracting them 
 from past cases and fitting them to the case in 
 hand. He had a memory which forgot nothing, and 
 which, indeed, wearied him by refusing to forget 
 trivial things. When he delivered an elaborate 
 judgment it was his delight to run through a long 
 series of cases, classifying and distinguishing 
 them. His strength made him bold ; he went 
 further than most judges in readiness to carry 
 a principle somewhat beyond any decided case, 
 and to overrule an authority which he did not 
 respect. The fault charged on him was his 
 tendency, perhaps characteristic of the liebrew 
 mind, to take a somewhat hard and dry view
 
 i8o Biographical Studies 
 
 of a legal principle, overlooking its more deli- 
 cate shades, and, in the interpretation of 
 statutes or documents, to adhere too strictly to 
 the letter, overlooking the spirit. An eminent 
 lawyer said, "'If all judges had been like 
 Jessel, there might have been no equity." In 
 that respect many deemed him inferior to 
 Lord Cairns, the greatest judge among his con- 
 temporaries, who united to an almost equally 
 wide and accurate knowledge of the law a grasp 
 of principles possibly more broad and philo- 
 sophical than Jessel's was. Be this as it may, 
 the judgments of the Master of the Rolls, which 
 fill so many pages of the recent English Law 
 Reports, are among the best that have ever gone 
 to build up the fabric of the English law. Except 
 on two occasions, when he reserved judgment 
 at the request of his colleagues in the Court 
 of Appeal, they were delivered on the spur of 
 the moment, after the conclusion of the aru- 
 ments, or of so much of the arguments as he 
 allowed counsel to deliver ; but they have the 
 merits of carefully-considered utterances, so clear 
 and direct is their style, so concisely as well as 
 cogently are the authorities discussed and the 
 grounds of decision stated. The bold and sweep- 
 ing character which often belongs to them makes 
 them more instructive as well as more agreeable 
 reading than the judgments of most modern 
 judges, whose commonest fault is a timidity
 
 Sir George Jessel i8i 
 
 which tries to escape, by dwelling on the de- 
 tails of the particular case, from the enunciation 
 of a definite general principle. Positive and 
 definite Jessel always was. As he put it him- 
 self: " I may be wrong, but I never have any 
 doubts." 
 
 At the Bar, Jessel had been far from popular ; 
 for his manners were unpolished, and his conduct 
 towards other counsel overbearing. On the 
 Bench he improved, and became liked as well as 
 respected. There was a sort of rough bonhomie 
 about him, and though he could be disagreeable 
 on occasions to a leading counsel, especially if 
 brought from the commxon-law bar into his court, 
 he showed a good-humoured wish to deal gently 
 with young or inexperienced barristers. There 
 was also an obvious anxiety to do justice, an 
 impatience of mere technicalities, and a readiness, 
 remarkable in so strong-willed a man, to hear 
 what could be said against his own opinion, and to 
 reconsider it. Besides, a profession is naturally 
 proud of any one whose talents adorn it, and 
 whose eminence seems to be communicated to 
 the whole body. 
 
 Ever since, under the Plantagenet kings, the 
 Chancery became a law court, the office of Master 
 of the Rolls had been that of a judge of first 
 instance. In 1881 its character was changed, 
 and its occupant placed at the head of the 
 Court of Appeal. Thus it was as an appellate
 
 1 82 Biographical Studies 
 
 judge that Jessel latterly sat, giving no less 
 satisfaction in that capacity than in his former 
 one, and being indeed confessedly the strongest 
 judicial intellect (except Lord Cairns) on the 
 Bench. Outside his professional duties, his chief 
 interest was in the University of London, at 
 which he had himself graduated. He was a 
 member of its senate, and busied himself with its 
 examinations, being up till the last excessively 
 fond of work, and finding that of a judge who 
 sits for five or six hours daily insufficient to 
 satisfy his appetite. He was not what would 
 be called a highly cultivated man, although he 
 knew a great deal beyond the field of law, 
 mathematics, for instance, and Hebrew literature 
 and botany, for he had been brought up in 
 a not very refined circle, and had been absorbed 
 in legal work during the best years of his life. 
 But his was an intelligence of extraordinary power 
 and flexibility, eminently practical, as the Semitic 
 intellect generally is, and yet thoroughly scientific. 
 And he was also one of those strong natures who 
 make themselves disliked while they are fighting 
 their way to the top, but grow more genial and 
 more tolerant when they have won what they 
 sought, and perceive that others admit their pre- 
 eminence. The services which he rendered as a 
 judge illustrate not only the advantage of throw- 
 ing open all places to all comers the bigotry of 
 an elder day excluded the Jews from judicial office
 
 Sir George Jessel 183 
 
 altogether but also the benefit of having a judge 
 at least equal in ability to the best of those who 
 practise before him. It was because Jessel was 
 so easily master in his court that so large and 
 important a part of the judicial business of the 
 country was, during many years, despatched with 
 a swiftness and a success seldom equalled in the 
 annals of the English Courts.
 
 LORD CHANCELLOR CAIRNS 
 
 Hugh M'Calmont Cairns, afterwards Earl 
 Cairns (born 1819, died 1885), was one of three 
 remarkable Scoto- Irishmen whom the north-east 
 corner of Ulster gave to the United Kingdom 
 in one generation, and each of whom was fore- 
 most in the career he entered. Lord Lawrence 
 was the strongest of Indian or Colonial adminis- 
 trators, and did more than any other man to 
 save India for England in the crisis of the great 
 Mutiny of 1857. Lord Kelvin has been, since the 
 death of Charles Darwin, the first among British 
 men of science. Lord Cairns was unquestionably 
 the greatest judge of the Victorian epoch, perhaps 
 of the nineteenth century.^ His name and family 
 were of Scottish origin, but he combined with the 
 shrewd sense and grim persistency of Scotland 
 some measure of the keen partisanship which 
 marks the Irish Orangeman, Born an Episco- 
 
 ^ No biography of Lord Cairns has (so far as I know) appeared a 
 singular fact, considering the brilliancy of his career, and considering the 
 tendency which now prevails to bestow this kind of honour on many 
 persons of the second or even the third rank. One reason may be that 
 Cairns, great though he was, never won personal popularity even with his 
 own political party or among his contemporaries at the bar, and was to the 
 general public no more than a famous name, 
 
 184
 
 Lord Chancellor Cairns 185 
 
 palian, he grew up a Tory in politics, an earnest 
 Low-Church Evangelical in religion ; nor did his 
 opinions in either respect ever seem to alter 
 during his long life. His great abilities were 
 perceived both at school (he was educated at 
 the Academy in Belfast) and at college (Trinity 
 College, Dublin), and so much impressed the 
 counsel in whose chambers he studied for a 
 year in London, that he strongly dissuaded the 
 young man from returning to Dublin to practise 
 at the Irish bar, promising him a brilliant career 
 on the wider theatre of England. The prediction 
 was verified by the rapidity with which Cairns, 
 who had, no doubt, the advantage of influential 
 connections in the City of London, rose into 
 note. He obtained (as a Conservative) a seat 
 in Parliament for his native town of Belfast 
 when only thirty -three years of age, and was 
 appointed Solicitor- General to Lord Derby's 
 second Ministry six years later a post which 
 few eminent lawyers have reached before fifty. 
 In the House of Commons, though at first 
 somewhat dififident and nervous, he soon proved 
 himself a powerful as well as ready speaker, and 
 would doubtless have remained in an assembly 
 where he was renderincj such valuable services 
 to his party but for the weakness of his lungs 
 and throat, which had threatened his life since 
 boyhood. He therefore accepted, in 1867, the 
 office of Lord Justice of Appeal, with a seat in
 
 1 86 Biographical Studies 
 
 the House of Lords, and next year was made 
 Lord Chancellor by Mr. Disraeli, then Prime 
 Minister, who dismissed Lord Chelmsford, then 
 Chancellor, in order to have the benefit of Cairns's 
 help as a colleague. Disraeli subsequently caused 
 him to be raised to an earldom. 
 
 After Lord Derby's death. Cairns led the 
 Tory party in the House of Lords for a time 
 (replacing the Duke of Richmond when the latter 
 quitted the leadership), but his very pronounced 
 Low-Church proclivities, coupled perhaps with a 
 certain jealousy felt toward him as a newcomer, 
 prevented him from becoming popular there, so 
 that ultimately the leadership of that House settled 
 itself in the hands of Lord Salisbury, a statesman 
 not superior to Cairns in political judgment or 
 argumentative power, but without the disadvan- 
 tage of being a lawyer, possessing a wider range 
 of political experience, and in closer sympathy 
 with the feelings and habits of the titled order. 
 There were, however, some peers who, when 
 Lord Beaconsfield died in 1881, desired to see 
 Cairns chosen to succeed him in the leadership 
 of the Tory party, then in opposition, in the 
 Upper Chamber. Whether in opposition or in 
 power, Cairns took a prominent part in all " full- 
 dress " political debates in the House of Lords 
 and in the discussion of legal measures, and was 
 indeed so absolutely master of the Chamber when 
 such measures came under discussion, that the
 
 Lord Chancellor Cairns 187 
 
 Liberal Government, during the years from 1S68 
 to 1874, and again from 1880 till 1885, could 
 carry no legal reforms through the House of 
 Lords except by his permission, which, of 
 course, was never given when such reforms 
 could seem to affect any political issue. Yet 
 the vehemence of his party feeling did not over- 
 cast his judgment. It was mainly through his 
 interposition (aided by that of Archbishop Tait) 
 that the House of Lords consented to pass the 
 Irish Church Bill of 1869, a measure which 
 Cairns, of course heartily disliking it, accepted 
 for the sake of saving to the disestablished 
 Church a part of her funds, since these might 
 have been lost had the Bill been rejected then 
 and passed next year by an angrier House of 
 Commons. Of all the members of Disraeli's 
 two Cabinets, he was the one whom Disraeli 
 himself had been wont most to trust and 
 most to rely on. In January 1874, when Mr. 
 Gladstone's suddenly announced dissolution of 
 Parliament startled all England one Saturday 
 morning, Disraeli, who heard of it while still in 
 bed, was at first frightened, thinking that the 
 Liberal leader had played his cards boldly and 
 well, and would carry the elections. When his 
 chief party manager came to see him he was 
 found restless and dejected, and cried out, " Send 
 for Cairns at once. " Lord Cairns was sent for, 
 came full of vigour, hope, and counsel, and after
 
 1 88 Biographical Studies 
 
 an hour's talk so restored the confidence of his 
 ally that Disraeli sat down in the best spirits to 
 compose his electoral manifesto. As everybody 
 knows, Cairns's forecast was right, and the Tories 
 won the general election by a large majority. 
 
 For political success Cairns had several qualities 
 of the utmost value a stately presence, a clear 
 head, a resolute will, and splendid oratorical gifts. 
 He was not an imaginative speaker, nor fitted 
 to touch the emotions ; but he had a match- 
 less power of statement, and a no less matchless 
 closeness and cogency in argument. In the 
 famous controversies of 1866, he showed himself 
 the clearest and most vigorous thinker amgng 
 the opponents of reform, more solid, if less 
 brilliant, than was Robert Lowe. His diction, 
 without being exceptionally choice, was pure and 
 precise, and his manner had a dignity and weight 
 which seemed to compel your attention even 
 when the matter was uninteresting. A voice 
 naturally neither strong nor musical, and some- 
 times apt to sound hollow (for the chest was weak), 
 was managed with great skill ; action and gesture 
 were used sparingly but effectively, and the tall 
 well-built figure and strongly-marked, somewhat 
 Roman features, with their haughty and distant 
 air, deepened the impression of power, courage, 
 and resolution which was characteristic of the 
 whole man. 
 
 The qualities of oratory I have described
 
 Lord Chancellor Cairns 189 
 
 may seem better fitted to a comparatively sober 
 and sedate assembly like the House of Lords 
 than to a changeful and excitable assembly 
 like the House of Commons. Yet, in point of 
 fact, Cairns spoke better in the Commons than he 
 did afterwards in the Lords, and would have left 
 an even higher oratorical reputation had his 
 career in the popular House been longer and his 
 displays more numerous. The reason seems to be 
 that the heat of that House warmed his somewhat 
 chilly temperament, and roused him to a more 
 energetic and ardent style of speaking than was 
 needed in the Upper Chamber, where he and 
 his friends, commanding a large majority, had 
 things all their own way. In the House of 
 Commons he confronted a crowd of zealous 
 adversaries, and put forth all the forces of his 
 logic and rhetoric to overcome them. In the more 
 languid House of Lords he was apt to be didactic, 
 sometimes even prolix. He overproved his own 
 case without feeling the need, which he would have 
 felt in the Commons, of overthrowing the case of 
 the other side ; his manner wanted animation and 
 his matter variety. Still, he was a great speaker, 
 greater as a speaker upon legal topics, where a 
 power of exact statement and lucid exposition is 
 required, than any one he left behind him. 
 
 Why, it may be asked, with these gifts, and 
 with so much firmness and energy of character, 
 did he not play an even more conspicuous part
 
 190 Biographical Studies 
 
 in politics, and succeed, after Lord Beaconsfield's 
 death, to the chieftaincy of the Tory party ? 
 The answer is to be found partly in the prejudice 
 which still survives in England against legal 
 politicians, partly in certain defects of his own 
 personality. Although sincerely pious, and ex- 
 emplary in all the relations of domestic life, he 
 was ungenial and unbending in social intercourse. 
 Few equally eminent men of our time have had so 
 narrow a circle of personal friends. There was a 
 dryness, a coldness, and an appearance of reserve 
 and hauteur about his manner which repelled 
 strangers, and kept acquaintanceship from ripening 
 into friendship. To succeed as a political leader, a 
 man must usually (I do not say invariably, because 
 there are a few remarkable instances Mr. Parnell's 
 would appear to be one of them to the contrary) 
 at least seem sympathetic ; must be able to enter 
 into the feelings of his followers, and show him- 
 self interested in them not merely as party 
 followers, but as human beings. There must be 
 a certain glow, a certain effluence of feeling about 
 him, which makes them care for him and rally 
 to him as a personality. Whether Lord Cairns 
 wanted warmth of heart, or whether it was that an 
 inner warmth failed to pierce the cloak of reserve 
 and pride which he habitually wore, I do not 
 attempt to determine. But the defect told heavily 
 against him. He never became a familiar figure 
 to the mass of his party, a person whose features
 
 Lord Chancellor Cairns 191 
 
 they knew, at whose name they would cheer ; 
 and nowadays all leaders, to whatever party they 
 belong, find a source of strength in winning this 
 kind of popularity. The quality which Ameri- 
 cans call magnetism is perhaps less essential 
 in England than in the country which distin- 
 guished and named it ; but it is helpful even 
 in England. Cairns, though an Irishman, was 
 wholly without it. 
 
 In the field of law, where passion has no 
 place, and even imagination must be content 
 to move with clipped wings along the ground, 
 the merits of Lord Cairns's intellect showed 
 to the best advantage. At the Chancery bar he 
 was one of a trio who had not been surpassed, if 
 ever equalled, during the nineteenth century, and 
 whom none of our now practising advocates rivals. 
 The other two were Mr., afterwards Lord Justice, 
 Rolt, and Mr. Roundell Palmer, afterwards Lord 
 Chancellor Selborne. All were admirable lawyers, 
 but, of the three, Rolt excelled in his spirited pre- 
 sentation of a case and in the lively vigour of his 
 arguments. Palmer was conspicuous for exhaust- 
 less ingenuity, and for a subtlety which sometimes 
 led him away into reasonings too fine for the 
 court to follow. Cairns was broad, massive, 
 convincing, with a robust urgency of logic which 
 seemed to grasp and fix you, so that while he 
 spoke you could fancy no conclusion possible save 
 that toward which he moved. His habit was to
 
 192 Biographical Studies 
 
 seize upon what he deemed the central and vital 
 point of the case, throwing the whole force of 
 his argument upon that one point, and holding 
 the judge's mind fast to it. 
 
 All these famous men were raised to the judicial 
 bench. Rolt remained there for a few months 
 only, so his time was too short to permit him to 
 enrich our jurisprudence and leave a memory of 
 himself in the Reports. Palmer sat in the House 
 of Lords from his accession to the Chancellorship 
 in 1872 till his death in 1896, and, while fully 
 sustaining his reputation as a man of eminent 
 legal capacity, was, on the whole, less brilliant as a 
 judge than he had been as an advocate, because a 
 tendency to over-refinement is more dangerous 
 in the judicial than in the forensic mind. He 
 made an admirable Chancellor, and showed him- 
 self more industrious and more zealous for law 
 reform than did Cairns. But Cairns was the 
 greater judge, and became to the generation 
 which argued before him a model of judicial ex- 
 cellence. In hearing a cause he was singularly 
 patient, rarely interrupting counsel, and then only 
 to put some pertinent question. His figure was 
 so still, his countenance so impassive, that people 
 sometimes doubted whether he was really attend- 
 ing to all that was urged at the bar. But when 
 the time came for him to deliver judgment, 
 which in the House of Lords is done in the form 
 of a speech addressed to the House in moving
 
 Lord Chancellor Cairns 193 
 
 or supporting a motion that is to become the judg- 
 ment of the tribunal, it was seen how fully he had 
 apprehended the case in all its bearings. His 
 deliverances were never lengthy, but they were 
 exhaustive. They went straight to the vital prin- 
 ciples on which the question turned, stated these 
 in the most luminous way, and applied them with 
 unerring exactitude to the particular facts. It is 
 as a storehouse of fundamental doctrines that his 
 judgments are so valuable. They disclose less 
 knowledge of case-law- than do those of some other 
 judges ; but Cairns was not one of the men who 
 love cases for their own sake, and he never cared 
 to draw upon, still less to display, more learning 
 than was needed for the matter in hand. It 
 was in the grasp of the principles involved, in 
 the breadth of view^ which enabled him to see 
 these principles in their relation to one another, in 
 the precision of the logic which drew conclusions 
 from the principles, in the perfectly lucid language 
 in which the principles were expounded and 
 applied, that his strength lay. Herein he sur- 
 passed the most eminent of contemporary judges, 
 the then Master of the Rolls, for while Jessel had 
 perhaps a quicker mind than Cairns, he had not so 
 wide a mind, nor one so thoroughly philosophical 
 in the methods by which it moved.' 
 
 1 Sir (1. JcsseTs eldest son has been good cnc)UL;h to inform nic that his 
 father liad the warmest admiration for Cairns, heirii; accustomed to say that 
 Lord Ilardwicke was the greatest jud{^e of tlie eighteenth centiu)-, and Lord 
 Cairns of the nineteenth. AWc /u Stroud Edition. 
 
 O
 
 194 Biographical Studies 
 
 Outside the spheres of law and poHtics, Cairns's 
 only interest was in religion. He did not seem, 
 although a good classical scholar and a competent 
 mathematician, to care either for letters or for 
 science. But he was a Sunday-school teacher 
 nearly all his life. Prayer-meetings were held 
 at his house, at which barristers, not otherwise 
 known for their piety, but believed to desire 
 county court judgeships, were sometimes seen. 
 He used to take the chair at missionary and 
 other philanthropic meetings. He was sur- 
 rounded by evangelisers and clergymen. But 
 nothing softened the austerity or melted the ice 
 of his manners. Neither did the great position 
 he had won seem to give a higher and broader 
 quality to his statesmanship. It is true that in 
 law he was wholly free from the partisanship 
 which tinged his politics. No one was more 
 perfectly fair upon the bench ; no one more 
 honestly anxious to arrive at a right decision. 
 And as a law reformer, although he effected less 
 than might have been hoped from his abilities or 
 expected from the absolute sway which he exer- 
 cised while Chancellor in Lord Beaconsfield s 
 Government from 1874 to 1880, he was free from 
 prejudice, and willing to sweep away antiquated 
 rules or usages if they seemed to block the 
 channel of speedy justice. But in politics this 
 impartiality and elevation vanished even after he 
 had risen so high that he did not need to humour
 
 Lord Chancellor Cairns 195 
 
 the passions or confirm the loyalty of his own 
 associates. He seemed to be not merely a party 
 man, which an English politician is forced to be, 
 because if he stands outside party he cannot effect 
 anything, but a partisan that is, a man wholly 
 devoted to his party, who sees everything through 
 its eyes, and argues every question in its interests. 
 He gave the impression of being either unwilling 
 or unable to rise to a higher and more truly 
 national view, and sometimes condescended to 
 arguments whose unsoundness his penetrating 
 intellect could hardly have failed to detect. His 
 professional tone had been blameless, but at the 
 bar the path of rectitude is plain and smooth, and 
 a scrupulous mind finds fewer cases of conscience 
 present themselves in a year than in Parliament 
 within a month. Yet if in this respect Cairns 
 failed to reach a level worthy of his splendid 
 intellect, the defect was due not to any selfish 
 view of his own interest, but rather to the narrow- 
 ness of the groove into which his mind had fallen, 
 and to the atmosphere of Orange sentiment in 
 which he had grown up. As a politician he is 
 already beginning to be torgotten ; but as a judge 
 he will be held in honourable remembrance as 
 one of the five or six most brilliant luminaries 
 that have adorned the English bench since those 
 remote days ^ in which the beginning of legal 
 memory is placed. 
 
 ^ The rt'it;n of King Richard llic I'irsi.
 
 BISHOP FRASER 
 
 James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester from 1870 
 till 1885, was born in Gloucestershire, of a Scottish 
 family, in 1818, and died at Manchester in 1885/ 
 He took no prominent part in ecclesiastical politics, 
 and no part at all in general politics. Though 
 a sound classical scholar in the old-fashioned 
 sense of the term he won the Ireland University 
 Scholarship at Oxford, then and still vthe most 
 conspicuous prize in the field of classics he was 
 not an exceptionally cultivated man, and he never 
 wrote anything except official reports and epis- 
 copal charges. Neither was he, although a ready 
 and effective speaker, gifted with the highest 
 kind of eloquence. Neither was he a profound 
 theologian. Yet his character and career are of 
 permanent interest, for he created not merely a new 
 episcopal type, but (one may almost say) a new 
 ecclesiastical type within the Church of England. 
 Till some sixty or seventy years ago the 
 normal English bishop was a rich, dignified, and 
 rather easy-going magnate, aristocratic in his 
 tastes and habits, moderate in his theology, some- 
 
 ^ Two Lives of Dr. Fraser have been published, one (in 1887) by 
 the late Judge Hughes, the other, which gives a fuller impression of his 
 personal character, by the Rev. J. \V. Diggle (1891). 
 
 196
 
 Bishop Fraser 197 
 
 times to the verge of indifferentism, quite as much 
 a man of the world as a pastor of souls. He had 
 usually obtained his preferment by his family con- 
 nections, or by some service rendered to the court 
 or a political chief perhaps even by solicitation 
 or intrigue. Now and then eminence in learning 
 or literature raised a man to the bench : there 
 were, for instance, the "Greek play" bishops, 
 such as Dr. Monk of Gloucester, whose fame 
 rested on their editions of the Attic dramatists ; 
 and the Qtiartei'ly Revieiv bishops, such as 
 Dr. Copleston, of Llandaff, whose powerful pen, 
 as well as his wise administration of the great 
 Oxford College over which he long presided, 
 amply justified his promotion. So even in the 
 eighteenth century the illustrious Butler had 
 been Bishop of Durham, as in Ireland the 
 illustrious Berkeley had been Bishop of Cloyne, 
 But, on the whole, the bishops of our grand- 
 fathers' days were more remarkable for their 
 prudence and tact, their adroitness or supple- 
 ness, than for intellectual or moral superiority to 
 the rest of the clergy. Their own upper-class 
 world, and the middle class which, in the main, 
 took its view of English institutions from the 
 upper class, respected them as a part of the solid 
 fabric of English society, but they were a mark 
 for Radical invective and for literary sneers. 
 Their luxurious pomp and ease were incessantly 
 contrasted with the simplicity of the apostles and
 
 igS Biographical Studies 
 
 the poverty of curates, and the abundance among 
 them of the gifts that befit the senate or the 
 drawing-room was compared with the rarity of the 
 graces that adorn a saint. The comparison was 
 hardly fair, for saints are scarce, and a good bishop 
 needs some qualities which a saint may lack. 
 
 That revival within the Church of England 
 which went on in various forms from 1800 till 
 1870, at first Low Church or Evangelical in its 
 tendencies, latterly more conspicuously High 
 Church and Ritualist, began from below and 
 worked upwards till at length it reached the 
 bishops. Lord Palmerston, influenced by Lord 
 Shaftesbury, filled the vacant sees that fell to him 
 with earnest men, sometimes narrow, sometimes 
 deficient in learning, but often good preachers, and 
 zealous for the doctrines they held. When the 
 High Churchmen found their way to the Bench, 
 as they did very largely under Lord Derby's and 
 Mr. Gladstone's rule, they showed as much theo- 
 logical zeal as the Evangelicals, and perhaps more 
 talent for administration. The popular idea of 
 what may be expected from a bishop rose, and the 
 bishops rose with the idea. As Bishop of Oxford, 
 Dr. Samuel Wilberforce was among the first to 
 make himself powerfully felt through his diocese. 
 His example told upon other prelates, and prime 
 ministers grew more anxious to select energetic 
 and popular men. So it came to pass that the 
 bishops began to be among the foremost men in
 
 Bishop Fraser 199 
 
 the Church of England. Some, like Dr. Magee 
 of Peterborough, and afterwards of York, were 
 brilliant orators ; some, like Dr. Lightfoot of 
 Durham, profound scholars ; some, like Dr. 
 Temple of Exeter, able and earnest adminis- 
 trators. There remained but few who had not 
 some good claim to the dignity they enjoyed. 
 So it may be said, when one compares the later 
 Victorian bishops with their Georgian predeces- 
 sors, that no class in the country has improved 
 more. Few now sneer at them, for no set of men 
 take a more active and more creditable part in the 
 public business of the country. Their incomes, 
 curtailed of late years in the case of the richer 
 sees, are no more than sufficient for the expenses 
 which fall upon them, and they work as hard as 
 any other men for their salaries. Though the 
 larger sees have been divided, the reduction of 
 the toil of bishops thus effected has been less than 
 the addition to it due to the growth of popula- 
 tion and the increased activity of the clergy. The 
 only defect which the censorious still impute to 
 them is a certain episcopal conventionality, a dis- 
 position to try to please everybody by the use of 
 vague professional language, a tendency to think 
 too much about the Church as a church establish- 
 ment, and to defer to clerical opinion when they 
 ought to speak and act with an independence 
 born of their individual opinions. Some of them, 
 as. for instance, the three I have just mentioned,
 
 2 00 Biographical Studies 
 
 were not open to this reproach. It was one 
 of the merits and charms of Fraser that he was 
 absolutely free from any such tendency. Other 
 men, such as Bishop Lightfoot, have been not 
 less eminent models of the virtues which ought 
 to characterise a great Christian pastor ; but 
 Fraser (appointed some time before Lightfoot) 
 was the first to be an absolutely unconventional 
 and, so to speak, unepiscopal bishop. His career 
 marked a new departure and set a new example. 
 
 Fraser spent the earlier years of his manhood 
 in Oxford, as a tutor in Oriel College, teaching 
 Thucydides and Aristotle. Like many of his 
 Oxford contemporaries, he continued through life 
 to think on Aristotelian lines, and one could trace 
 them in his sermons. He then took in succession 
 two college livings, both in quiet nooks in the 
 South of England, and discharged for nearly 
 twenty years the simple duties of a parish priest, 
 unknown to the great world, but making himself 
 beloved by the people, and doing his best to 
 improve their condition. The zeal he had shown 
 in promoting elementary education caused him to 
 be appointed (in 1865) by the Schools Inquiry 
 Commissioners to be their Assistant Commis- 
 sioner to examine the common-school system of 
 the United States, and the excellence of his report 
 thereon attracted the notice of the late Lord 
 Lyttelton, one of those Commissioners who were 
 then sitting to investigate the state of secondary
 
 Bishop Fraser 201 
 
 education in England. His report long remained 
 by far the best general picture of i\merican 
 schools, conspicuous for its breadth of view, its 
 clearness of statement, its sympathetic insight 
 into conditions unlike those he had known in 
 England. On the recommendation (as has been 
 generally believed) of Lord Lyttelton and of the 
 then Bishop of Salisbury, who was a friend of 
 Dr. Eraser's, Mr. Gladstone, at that time Prime 
 Minister, appointed him Bishop of Manchester 
 in 1870. The diocese of Manchester, which 
 included all Lancashire except Liverpool and a 
 small district in the extreme north of the county, 
 had been under a bishop who, although an able 
 and learned man, capable of making himself 
 agreeable when he pleased, was personally un- 
 popular, and had done little beyond his formal 
 duties. He lived in a large and handsome 
 country-house some miles from the city, and was 
 known by sight to very few of its inhabitants. 
 (I was familiar with Lancashire in those days, for 
 I had visited all its grammar-schools as Assistant 
 Commissioner to the Commission just referred 
 to, and there was hardly a trace to be found in 
 it of the bishop's action.) Fraser had not been 
 six months in the county before everything was 
 changed. The country mansion was sold, and he 
 procured a modest house in one of the less fashion- 
 able suburbs of the city. He preached twice 
 every Sunday, usually in some parish church, and
 
 2 02 Biographical Studies 
 
 spent the week in travelling up and down his 
 diocese, so that the days were few in which he 
 was not on the railway. He stretched out the 
 hand of friendship to the Dissenters (numerous 
 and powerful in the manufacturing districts), who 
 had hitherto regarded a bishop as a sort of natural 
 enemy, gained their confidence, and soon became 
 as popular with them as with the laity of his 
 own Church. He associated himself with all 
 the works of benevolence or public utility which 
 w^ere in progress, subscribed to all so far as his 
 means allowed, and was always ready to speak 
 at a meeting on behalf of any good enterprise. 
 He dealt in his sermons with the topics of the 
 day, avoiding party politics, but speaking his 
 mind on all social and moral questions with a 
 freedom which sometimes involved him in passing 
 difficulties, but stimulated the minds of his hearers, 
 and gave the impression of his own perfect 
 candour and perfect courage. He used to say 
 that as he felt it his duty to speak wherever he 
 was asked to do so, he must needs speak without 
 preparation, and must therefore expect sometimes 
 to get into hot water ; that this was a pity, but 
 it was not his fault that he was reported, and 
 that it was better to run the risk of making 
 mistakes and suffering for them than to refuse 
 out of self-regarding caution to give the best of 
 himself to the diocese. He had that true modesty 
 which makes a man willing to do a thing im-
 
 Bishop Fraser 203 
 
 perfectly, at the risk of lowering his intellectual 
 reputation. He knew that he was neither a deep 
 thinker nor a finished preacher, and was content 
 to be what he was, so long as he could perform 
 the work which it was in him to do. He lost 
 no opportunity of meeting the working men, 
 would go and talk to them in the yards of the 
 mills or at the evening gatherings of mechanics' 
 institutes ; and when any misfortune befell, such 
 as a colliery accident, he was often among the 
 first who reached the spot to help the survivors 
 and comfort the widows. He declared his sym- 
 pathy with the agricultural labourers in their strike 
 for higher wages at a time when hardly any one in 
 his class thouorht of doinof so. He made no differ- 
 ence between rich and poor, showed no wish to be 
 a guest in the houses of the great, and treated the 
 poorest curate with as much courtesy as the most 
 pompous county magnate. His work in Lanca- 
 shire seldom allowed him to appear in the House 
 of Lords ; and this he regretted, not that he 
 desired to speak there, but because, as he said, 
 " Whether or not bishops do Parliament good, 
 Parliament does bishops good." 
 
 Such a simple, earnest, active course of conduct 
 told upon the feelings of the people who read of 
 his words and doings. But even greater was the 
 impression made by his personality upon those 
 who saw him. He was a tall, well-built man,' 
 
 1 lie was a ;^ock1 juclt^e of horses, and had i;i h.is youth been foiul of hunling.
 
 2 04 Biographical Studies 
 
 erect in figure, with a quick eye, a firm step, a 
 ruddy face, an expression of singular heartiness 
 and geniality. He seemed always cheerful, and, 
 in spite of his endless labours, always fresh and 
 strong. His smile and the grasp of his hand 
 put you into good-humour with yourself and the 
 world ; if you were dispirited, they led you out 
 of shadow into sunlight. He was not a great 
 reader, and had no time for sustained and search- 
 ing thought ; yet he seemed always abreast of 
 what was passing in the world, and to know w^hat 
 the books and articles and speeches of the day 
 contained, although he could not have found time 
 to peruse them. With strong opinions of his own, 
 he was anxious to hear yours ; a ready and eager 
 talker, yet a willing listener. His oratory was 
 plain, with few flights of rhetoric, but it was direct 
 and vigorous, free from conventional phrases, 
 charged with clear good sense and genuine feel- 
 ing, and capable, when his feeling was exception- 
 ally strong, of rising to eloquence. He had a 
 ready sense of humour, the best proof of which 
 was that he relished a joke against himself.^ 
 
 ^ A clergyman of his diocese had once, under the greatest provoca- 
 tion, knocked down a person who had insulted him, and the bishop wrote 
 him a letter of reproof pointing out (among other things) that, exposed as 
 the Church of England was to much criticism on all hands, her ministers 
 ought to be very careful in their demeanour. The offender replied by 
 saying, " I must regretfully admit that being grossly insulted, and forget- 
 ting in the heat of the moment the critical position of the Church of 
 England, I did knock the man down, etc." Eraser, delighted with this 
 turning of the tables on himself, told me the anecdote with great glee, and 
 invited the clergyman to stay with him not long afterwards.
 
 Bishop Fraser 205 
 
 However, the greatest charm, both of his pubHc 
 and private talk, was the transparent sincerity 
 and honesty that shone through it. His mind 
 was Hke a crystal pool of water in a mountain 
 stream. You saw everything that was in it, and 
 saw nothing that was mean or unworthy. This 
 sincerity and freshness made his character not 
 only manly, but lovable and beautiful, beautiful 
 in its tenderness, its loyalty to his friends, its 
 devotion to truth. 
 
 His conscientious anxiety to say nothing more 
 than he thought was apt to make him an em- 
 barrassing ally. It happened more than once 
 that when he came to speak at a public meeting 
 on behalf of some enterprise, he was not content, 
 like most men, to set forth its merits and claims, 
 but went on to dwell upon possible drawbacks 
 or dangers, so that the more ardent friends of 
 the scheme thought he was pouring cold water 
 on them, and called him a Balaam reversed. In 
 a political assembly he would have been an enfant 
 terrible whom his party would have feared to put 
 up to speak ; but as people in the diocese got to 
 know that this was his way, they only smiled at 
 his too ingenuous honesty. As he spoke with no 
 preparation, and was naturally impulsive, he now 
 and then spoke unadvisedly, and received a good 
 deal of newspaper censure. But he was never 
 involved in real trouble by these speeches. As 
 Dean Stanley wrote to him, " You have a singular
 
 2o6 Biographical Studies 
 
 gift of going to the very verge of imprudence and 
 yet never crossing it." 
 
 No one will wonder that such a character, set 
 in a conspicuous place, and joined to extraordinary 
 activity and zeal, should have produced an im- 
 mense effect on the people of his city and diocese. 
 Since Nonconformity arose in England in the 
 seventeenth century, no bishop, perhaps, indeed 
 no man, whether cleric or layman, had done so 
 much to draw together people of different religious 
 persuasions and help them to realise their common 
 Christianity. Densely populated South Lanca- 
 shire is practically one huge town, and he was its 
 foremost citizen ; the most instant in all good 
 works ; the one whose words were most sure to 
 find attentive listeners. This was because he 
 spoke, I will not say as a layman, but simply 
 as a Christian, never claiming for himself any 
 special authority in respect either of his sacer- 
 dotal character or his official position. No English 
 prelate before him had been so welcome to all 
 classes and sections ; none was so much lamented 
 by the masses of the people. But it is a signi- 
 ficant fact that he was from first to last more 
 popular with the laity than with the clergy. Not 
 that there was ever any slur on his orthodoxy. 
 He began life as a moderate High Churchman, 
 and gradually verged, half unconsciously, toward 
 what would be called a Broad-Church position ; 
 maintaining the claim of the Anglican Church to
 
 Bishop Fraser 207 
 
 undertake, and her duty to hold herself responsible 
 for, the education of the people, and upholding 
 her status as an establishment, but dwelling little 
 on minor points of doctrinal difference, and seem- 
 ing to care still less for external observances or 
 points of ritual. This displeased the Anglo- 
 Catholic party, and even among other sections of 
 the clergy there was a kind of feeling that the 
 Bishop was not sufficiently clerical, did not set full 
 store by the sacerdotal side of his office, and did 
 not think enough about ecclesiastical questions. 
 
 He was, I think, the first bishop who greeted 
 men of science as fellow-workers for truth, and 
 declared that Christianity had not, and could not 
 have, anything to fear from scientific inquiry. 
 This has often been said since, but in 1870 it was 
 so novel that it drew from Huxley a singularly 
 warm and impressive recognition. He was one 
 of the first bishops to condemn the system of 
 theological tests in the English universities. He 
 even declared that "it was an evil hour when 
 the Church thought herself obliged to add to or 
 develop the simple articles of the Apostles' Creed." 
 These deliverances, which any one can praise 
 now, alarmed a large section of the Church of 
 England then ; nor was the bishop's friendliness 
 to Dissenters favourably regarded by those who 
 deny to Dissenting pastors the title of Christian 
 ministers.^ 
 
 ' He \\r,s liiinsclf unarc thr.i iliis causetl (lisplcasurc. In his latest
 
 2o8 Biographical Studies 
 
 The gravest trouble of his life arose in connec- 
 tion with legal proceedings which he felt bound 
 to take in the case of a Ritualist clergyman 
 who had persisted in practices apparently illegal. 
 Fraser, though personally the most tolerant of 
 men to those who differed from his own theologi- 
 cal views, felt bound to enforce the law, because 
 it was the law, and was at once assailed unjustly, 
 as well as bitterly, by those who sympathised with 
 the offending clergyman, and who could not, or 
 would not, understand that a bishop, like other 
 persons in an official position, may hold it his 
 absolute duty to carry out the directions of the 
 law whether or no he approves the law, and at 
 whatever cost to himself. These attacks were 
 borne with patience and dignity. He was never 
 betrayed into recriminations, and could the more 
 easily preserve his calmness, because he felt no 
 animosity. 
 
 A bishop may be a power outside his own 
 religious community even in a country where 
 
 Charge, delivered some months before his death, he said : "I am 
 charged, amongst other grievous sins, with that of thinking not unkindly, 
 and speaking not unfavourably, of Dissenters. I don't profess to love 
 dissent, but I have received innumerable kindnesses from Dissenters. 
 Why should I abuse them ? Why should I call them hard names ? 
 Remembering how Nonconformity was made no doubt sometimes by 
 self-will and pride and prejudice and ignorance, but far more often by the 
 Church's supineness, neglect, and intolerance in days long since gone by, 
 of which we have not yet paid the full penalty though, as I have said, 
 I love not the thing, I cannot speak harshly of it." 
 
 That a defence was needed may seem strange to those *wIio do not 
 know England.
 
 Bishop Fraser 209 
 
 the clergy are separated as a caste from the lay 
 people. Such men as Dupanloup in France show 
 that. So too he may be a mighty moral and 
 religious force outside his own religious com- 
 munity in a country where there is no church 
 established or endowed by the State. The 
 example of Dr. Phillips Brooks in the United 
 States shows that. But Dupanloup would have 
 been eminent and influential had he not been a 
 clergyman at all ; and Dr. Brooks was the most 
 inspiring preacher and the most potent leader of 
 religious thought in America long before, in 
 the last years of his life, he reluctantly consented 
 to accept the episcopal office. Fraser, not so 
 gifted by nature as either of those men, would 
 have had little chance of doing the work he did 
 save in a country where the existence of an 
 ancient establishment secures for one of its diQfni- 
 taries a position of far-reaching influence. When 
 the gains and losses to a nation of the retention 
 of a church establishment are reckoned up, this 
 may be set down among the gains. 
 
 If tjie Church of England possessed more 
 leaders like Tait, Fraser, and Lightfoot the 
 statesman, the citizen, and the scholar in the 
 characters and careers of all of whom one finds 
 the common mark of a catholic and pacific spirit, 
 she would have no need to fear any assaults of 
 political foes, no temptation to ally herself with 
 any party, but might stand as an establishment
 
 2IO Biographical Studies 
 
 until, after long years, by the general wish of her 
 own people, as well as of those who are without, 
 she passed peaceably into the position of being 
 the first in honour, numbers, and influence among 
 a group of Christian communities, all equally free 
 from State control. 
 
 Eraser's example showed how much an attitude 
 of unpretending simplicity and friendliness to all 
 sects and classes may do to mitigate the jealousy 
 and suspicion which still embitter the relations of 
 the different religious bodies in England, and 
 which work for evil even in its politics. He 
 created, as Dean Stanley said, a new type of 
 episcopal excellence : and why should not origin- 
 ality be shown in the conception and discharge of 
 an office as well as in the sphere of pure thought 
 or of literary creation ?
 
 SIR STAFFORD HENRY NORTHCOTE, 
 EARL OF IDDESLEIGH^ 
 
 Sir Stafford Northcote (born i8iS, died 1887) 
 belonged to a type of politician less common 
 among us . than it used to be, and likely to 
 become still more rare as England grows more 
 democratic the county gentleman of old family 
 and good estate, who receives and profits by a 
 classical education at one of the ancient uni- 
 versities, who is at an early age returned to 
 Parliament in respect of his social position in 
 his county, who has leisure to cultivate him- 
 self for statesmanship, who has tastes and 
 resources outside the sphere of politics. Devon- 
 shire, whence he came, has preserved more 
 of the old features of English country life 
 than the central and northern parts of England, 
 where manufactures and the growth of popula- 
 tion have swept away the venerable remains of 
 feudalism. In Devonshire the old families are 
 still deeply respected by the people. They are 
 so intermarried that most of them have ties of 
 
 ^ A Life of Lord Lddcsleigh, wriiieii l)y .Mr. Andrew Lang;, presents 
 Norllicote's character and career with fairness and discrimination.
 
 2 12 Biographical Studies 
 
 kinship with all their neighbours. Few rich 
 parvenus have intruded among them ; society is 
 therefore exceptionally easy, simple, and unosten- 
 tatious. There is still a strong local patriotism, 
 which makes every Devonshire man, whatever 
 his political prepossessions, proud of other Devon- 
 shire men who rise to eminence, and which 
 exerts a wholesome influence on the tone of 
 manners and social intercourse. Northcote was a 
 thorough Devonshire man, who loved his county 
 and knew its dialect : his Devonshire stories, 
 told with the strong accent he could assume, 
 were the delight of any company that could 
 tempt him to repeat them. He was immensely 
 popular in the county, and had well earned his 
 popularity by his pleasant neighbourly ways, as 
 well as by his attention to county business and 
 to the duties of a landowner. 
 
 He had the time-honoured training of the 
 good old English type, was a schoolboy at 
 Eton, went thence to Oxford, won the highest 
 distinctions as a scholar, and laid the founda- 
 tions of a remarkably wide knowledge of modern 
 as well as ancient literature. He served his 
 apprenticeship to statesmanship as private secre- 
 tary to Mr. Gladstone, who was then (1843) 
 a member of Sir Robert Peel's Government. 
 When the great schism in the Tory party took 
 place over the question of free trade in corn, he 
 was not yet in Parliament, and therefore was
 
 Sir Stafford Northcote 213 
 
 not driven to choose between Peel and the 
 Protectionists. In 1855, when he first entered 
 the House of Commons, that question was settled 
 and gone, so there was no inconsistency in his 
 entering the Tory ranks although himself a 
 decided Free Trader. He was not a man who 
 would have elbowed his way upward. But elbows 
 were not needed. His abilities, as well as his 
 industry and the confidence he inspired, speedily 
 brought him to the top. He was appointed 
 Secretary to the Treasury in 1859, entered the 
 Cabinet in 1866, when a new Tory Ministry 
 was formed under Lord Derby ; and when in 
 1876 Mr. Disraeli retired to the House of Lords, 
 he became, being then Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer, leader of the majority in the House 
 of Commons, while Mr. Gathorne Hardy, the 
 only other person who had been thought of 
 as suitable for that post, received a peerage. 
 Mr. Hardy was a more forcible and rousing 
 speaker, but Northcote had more varied accom- 
 plishments and a fuller mastery of official work. 
 Disraeli said that he had " the largest parliament- 
 ary knowledge of any man he had met." 
 
 As an administrator, Sir Stafford Northcote 
 was diligent, judicious, and free from any taint 
 of jobbery. He sought nothing for himself; 
 did not abuse his patronage ; kept the public 
 interests steadily before his mind. He was con- 
 siderate to his subordinates, and gracious to all
 
 2 14 Biographical Studies 
 
 men. He never grudged labour, although there 
 might be no prospect of winning credit by it. 
 Scrupulous in discharging his duties to his 
 party, he overtaxed his strength by speaking 
 constantly at public meetings in the country, a 
 kind of work he must have disliked, and for 
 which he was ill fitted by the moderation of his 
 views and of his language. Parliament is not a 
 good place for the pursuit of pure truth, but the 
 platform is still less favourable to that quest. It 
 was remarked of him that even in party gather- 
 ings, where invective against political opponents 
 is apt to be expected and relished, he argued 
 fairly, and never condescended to abuse. 
 
 As a Parliamentarian he had two eminent 
 merits immense knowledge and admirable 
 readiness. He had been all his life a keen 
 observer and a diligent student ; and as his 
 memory was retentive, all that he had ob- 
 served or read stood at his command. In 
 questions of trade and finance, questions which, 
 owing, perhaps, to their increasing intricacy, 
 seem to be less and less frequently mastered 
 by practical politicians in England, he was 
 especially strong. No other man on his own 
 side in politics spoke on such matters with equal 
 authority, and the brunt of the battle fell on 
 him whenever they came up for discussion. 
 As he had now his old master for his chief 
 antagonist, the conflict was no easy one ; but he
 
 Sir StafFord Northcote 215 
 
 never shrank from it. Not less remarkable was 
 his alertness in debate. His manner was indeed 
 somewhat ineffective, for it wanted both force 
 and variety. Sentence followed sentence in a 
 smooth and easy stream, always clear, always 
 grammatically correct, but with a flow too equably 
 unbroken. There were few impressive phrases, 
 few brilliant figures, few of those appeals to 
 passion with which it is necessary to warm and 
 rouse a larg-e assemblv. When the House p^rew 
 excited at the close of a long full-dress debate, 
 and Sir Stafford rose in the small hours of the 
 morning to wind it up on behalf of his party, men 
 felt that the ripple of his sweet voice, the softness 
 of his gentle manner, were not what the occasion 
 called for. But what he said was always to the 
 point and well worth hearing. No facts or 
 arguments suddenly thrown at him by oppo- 
 nents disconcerted him ; for there was sure to 
 be an answer ready. However weak his own 
 case might seem, his ingenuity could be relied 
 upon to strengthen it ; however powerfully the 
 hostile case had been presented, he found weak 
 places in it and shook it down by a succession 
 of well-planted criticisms, each apparently small, 
 but damaofinp- when taken all toi/ether, because 
 no one of them could be dismissed as irrelevant. 
 
 It was interesting to watch him as he sat on 
 the front bench, with his hat set so low on his brow 
 that it hid all the upper part of his face, while the
 
 2i6 Biographical Studies 
 
 lower part was covered by a thick yellowish-brown 
 beard, perfectly motionless, rarely taking a note 
 of what was said, and, to all appearance, the most 
 indifferent figure in the House. The only sign 
 of feeling which he gave was to be found in 
 his habit of thrusting each of his hands up the 
 opposite sleeve of his coat when Mr. Gladstone, 
 the only assailant whom he needed to fear, burst 
 upon him in a hailstorm of declamation. But 
 when he rose, one perceived that nothing had 
 escaped him. Every point which an antagonist 
 had made was taken up and dealt with ; no point 
 that could aid his own contention was neglected ; 
 and the fluent grace with which his discourse 
 swept along, seldom aided by a reference to 
 notes, was not more surprising than the unfailing 
 skill with which he shunned dangerous ground, 
 and put his propositions in a form which made 
 it difficult to contradict them. I remember to 
 have heard a member of the opposite party 
 remark, that nothing was more difficult than to 
 defend your argument from Northcote, because 
 he had the art of nibbling it away, admitting 
 a little in order to evade or overthrow the rest. 
 
 So much for his parliamentary aptitudes, which 
 were fully recognised before he rose to leadership. 
 But as it was his leadership that has given him a 
 place in history, I may dwell for a little upon the 
 way in which he filled that most trying as well 
 as most honourable post. He led the House
 
 Sir Stafford Northcote 217 
 
 that is to say, the Ministerial majority for four 
 sessions (1877- 1880), and the Tory Opposition for 
 five and a half sessions (1880 to middle of 1885). 
 To lead the House of Commons a man must have, 
 over and above the qualities which make a good 
 debater, an unusual combination of talents. He 
 must be both bold and cautious, combative and 
 cool. He must take, on his own responsibility, 
 and on the spur of the moment, decisions which 
 commit the whole Ministry, and yet, especially if 
 he be not Prime Minister, he must consider how 
 far his colleagues will approve and implement his 
 action. He must put enough force and fire 
 into his speeches to rouse his own ranks and 
 intimidate (if he can) his opponents, yet must 
 have regard to the more timorous spirits among 
 his own supporters, going no further than he 
 feels they will follow, and must sometimes throw 
 a crafty fiy over those in the Opposition w^hom 
 he thinks wavering or disaffected. Under the 
 fire of debate, perhaps while composing the 
 speech he has .to make in reply, he must 
 consider not merely the audience before him 
 but also the effect his words will have when 
 they are read next morning in cold blood, 
 and, it may be, the effect not only in England 
 but abroad. Being responsible for the whole 
 conduct of parliamentary business, he must keep 
 a close watch upon every pending bill, and de- 
 termine how much of Government time shall be
 
 2i8 Biographical Studies 
 
 allotted to each, and in what order they shall be 
 taken, and how far the general feeling of the 
 House will let him go in seizing the hours usually 
 reserved for private members, and in granting or 
 refusing opportunies for discussing topics he would 
 prefer to have not discussed at all. 
 
 So far as prudence, tact, and knowledge of 
 business could enable him to discharge these 
 duties, Northcote discharged them admirably. 
 It was his good fortune to have behind him in 
 Lord Beaconsfield, who had recently gone to the 
 House of Lords, a chief of the whole party who 
 trusted him, and with whom he was on the best 
 terms. The immense authority of that chief 
 secured his own authority. His party was as 
 the Tory party usually is compact and loyal ; 
 and his majority ample, so he had no reason 
 to fear defeat. In the conflicts that arose 
 over Eastern affairs in 1877-79, affairs at some 
 moments highly critical, he was cautious and 
 adroit, more cautious than Lord Beaconsfield, 
 sometimes repairing by modeu&te language the 
 harm which the latter's theatrical utterances 
 had done. When a group of Irish Nationalist 
 members, among whom Mr. Parnell soon came 
 to the front, began to evade the rules and 
 paralyse the action of the House by obstruct- 
 ive tactics, he was less successful. Their 
 ingenuity baffled the Ministry, and brought the 
 House into sore straits. But it may be doubted
 
 Sir Stafford Northcote 219 
 
 whether any leader could have overcome the 
 difficulties of the position. It was a new 
 position. The old rules framed under quite 
 different conditions were not fit to check mem- 
 bers who, far from regarding the sentiments of 
 the House, avowed their purpose to reduce it to 
 impotence, and thereby obtain that Parliament 
 of their own, which could alone, as they held, 
 cure the ills of Ireland. 
 
 After ten years of struggle and experiment, 
 drastic remedies for obstruction were at last 
 devised ; but in the then state of opinion within 
 the House, those remedies could not have been 
 carried. Members accustomed to the old state ot 
 things could not for a good while make up their 
 minds to sacrifice part of their own privileges in 
 order to deal with a difficulty the source of which 
 they would not attempt to cure. On the whole, 
 therefore, though he was blamed at the time, 
 Northcote may be deemed to have passed credit- 
 ably through his first period of leadership. 
 
 It was when he had to lead his party in 
 Opposition, after April 1880, that his severest 
 trial came. To lead the minority is usually easier 
 than to lead the majority. A leader of the 
 Opposition also must, no doubt, take swift de- 
 cisions in the midst of a debate, must consider 
 how far he is pledging his party to a policy 
 which they may be required to maintain when 
 next they come into power, must endeavour to
 
 2 20 Biographical Studies 
 
 judge, often on scanty data, how many of his usual 
 or nominal supporters will follow him into the 
 lobby when a division is called, and how best he 
 can draw off some votes from among his opponents. 
 Still, delicate as this work is, it is not so hard as 
 that of the leader of the Government, for it is 
 rather critical than constructive, and a mistake 
 can seldom do irreparable mischief. Northcote, 
 however, had special difficulties to face. Mr. 
 Gladstone, still full of energy and fire, was 
 leading the majority. After a few months 
 Lord Beaconsfield's mantle no longer covered 
 Northcote (that redoubtable strategist died 
 in April 1881), and a small but active group 
 of Tory members set up an irregular skirmish- 
 ing Opposition on their own account, paying 
 little heed to his moderate counsels. The Tory 
 party was then furious at its unexpected defeat 
 at the election of 1880. It was full of fight, burn- 
 ing for revenge, eager to denounce every trifling 
 error of the Ministry, and to give battle on small 
 as well as great occasions. Hence it resented 
 the calm and cautiously critical attitude which 
 Northcote took up. He had plenty of courage ; 
 but he thought, as indeed most impartial ob- 
 servers thought, that little was to be gained 
 by incessantly worrying an enemy so superior 
 in force and flushed with victory ; that prema- 
 ture assaults might consolidate a majority within 
 which there existed elements of discord ; and
 
 Sir Stafford Northcote 221 
 
 that it was wiser to wait till the Ministry should 
 begin to make mistakes and incur misfortunes in 
 the natural course of events, before resumino- the 
 offensive against them. There is a natural tend- 
 ency to reaction in English popular opinion, and 
 a tendency to murmur against whichever party 
 may be in power. This tendency must soon 
 have told in favour of the Tories, with little 
 effort on their own part ; and when it was already 
 manifest, a Parliamentary attack could have been 
 delivered with effect. Northcote's view and plan 
 w'ere probably right, but, being too prone to yield 
 to pressure, and finding his hand forced, he 
 allowed himself to be drawn by the clamour of 
 his followers into aggressive operations, which, 
 nevertheless, himself not quite approving them, 
 he conducted in a half-hearted way. He had 
 not Mr, Gladstone's power of doing excellently 
 what he hated to have to do. And it must be 
 admitted that from 18S2 onwards, when troubles 
 in Ireland and oscillations in Egyptian policy 
 had besfun to shake the credit of the Liberal 
 Ministry, he showed less fire and pugnacity than 
 the needs of the time required from a party 
 leader. In one thino- the vounof men, who, 
 like Zulu warriors, wished to wash their spears, 
 were right and he was wrong. He conceived 
 that frequent attacks and a resort to obstructive 
 tactics would damage the Opposition in the eyes 
 of the country. Experience has shown that
 
 222 Biographical Studies 
 
 parties do not greatly suffer from the way they 
 fight their Parhamentary battles. Few people 
 follow the proceedings closely enough to know 
 when an Opposition deserves blame for prolong- 
 ing debate, or a Ministry for abuse of the closure. 
 So, too, in the United States it would seem that 
 neither the tyrannical action of a majority nor 
 filibustering by a minority shocks the nation. 
 
 Not only was Northcote's own temper pacific, 
 but he was too sweetly reasonable and too dis- 
 passionate to be a successful leader in Oppo- 
 sition. He felt that he was never quite a 
 party man. His mind was almost too judicial, 
 his courtesy too unfailing, his temper too un- 
 ruffled, his manner too unassuming. He did not 
 inspire awe or fear. Not only did he never 
 seek to give pain, even where pain might have 
 been a wholesome discipline for pushing selfish- 
 ness he seemed incapable of irritation, and 
 bore with vexatious obstruction from some 
 members of the House, and mutinous attacks 
 from others who belonged to his own party, 
 when a spirit less kindly and forgiving might have 
 better secured his own authority and the dignity 
 of the assembly. He proceeded on the assump- 
 tion, an unsafe one, as he had too much reason 
 to know, that every one else was a gentleman 
 like himself, penetrated by the old traditions ot 
 the House of Commons. 
 
 While superior to the prejudices of the old-
 
 Sir Stafford Northcote 223 
 
 fashioned wing of his party, he was too cautious 
 and conscientious to join those who sought to 
 lead it into demagogic courses. So far as 
 poHtical opinions went, he might, had fortune 
 sent him into the world as the son of a Whig- 
 family, have made an excellent Whig, removed 
 as far from high Toryism on the one hand as 
 from Radicalism on the other. There was. there- 
 fore, a certain incompatibility between the m;m 
 and the position. Average partisans felt that a 
 leader so very reasonable was not in full sym- 
 pathy with them. Even his invincible optimism 
 displeased them. "Hang that fellow Northcote ! " 
 said one of them ; " he's always seeing blue sky." 
 The militant partisans, whatever their opinions, 
 desired a pugnacious chief. That a leader 
 should draw the enemy's fire does him good with 
 his followers, and makes them rally to him. But 
 the fire of his opponents was hardly ever directed 
 against Northcote, even when controversy was 
 hottest. Had he possessed a more imperious 
 will, he might have overcome these difficulties, 
 because his abilities and experience were of 
 the highest value to his party, and his char- 
 acter stood so high that the mass of sensible 
 Tories all over the country might perhaps have 
 rallied to him, if he had appealed to them 
 against the intrigues by which it was sought to 
 supplant him. He did not lack courage. But 
 he lacked what men call "backbone." B^or
 
 2 24 Biographical Studies 
 
 practical success, it is less fatal to fail in wisdom 
 than to fail in resolution. He had not that un- 
 quenchable self-confidence which I have sought 
 to describe in Disraeli, and shall have to describe 
 in Parnell and in Gladstone. He yielded to pres- 
 sure, and people came to know that he would 
 yield to pressure. 
 
 The end of it was that the weakened prestige 
 and final fall of the Liberal Ministry were not 
 Gredited to his generalship, but rather to those 
 who had skirmished in advance of the main army. 
 That fall was in reality due neither to him nor to 
 them, but partly to the errors or internal divisions 
 of the Ministry itself, partly to causes such as the 
 condition of Ireland and the revolt of Arabi in 
 Egypt, for which Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet was 
 no more, perhaps less, to blame than were some 
 preceding Governments. No Ministry of recent 
 years seemed, when it was formed, to have such a 
 source of strength in the abilities of the men who 
 composed it as did the Ministry of 1880. None 
 proved so persistently unlucky. 
 
 The circumstances under which Northcote's 
 leadership came to an end by his elevation to the 
 Upper House (June 1885) as Earl of Iddesleigh, 
 as well as those under which he was subsequently 
 (1887) removed from the post of Foreign Secre- 
 tary in the then Tory Ministry, evoked much 
 comment at the time, but some of the incidents 
 attending them have not yet been disclosed, and
 
 Sir Stafford Northcote 225 
 
 they could not be discussed without bringing in 
 other persons with whom I am not here concerned. 
 Conscious of his own loyalty to his party, and 
 remembering his long and laborious services, he 
 felt those circumstances deeply ; and they may have 
 hastened his death, which came very suddenly in 
 February 1887, and called forth a burst of sympathy 
 such as had not been seen since Peel perished by 
 an accident nearly forty years before. 
 
 In private life Northcote had the charm of 
 unpretending manners, coupled with abundant 
 humour, a store of anecdote, and a geniality 
 which came straight from the heart. No man 
 was a more agreeable companion. In 1884, 
 when the University of Edinburgh celebrated 
 its tercentenary, he happened to be Lord Rector, 
 and in that capacity had to preside over the 
 festivities. Although a stranger to Scotland, 
 and as far removed (for he was a decided 
 High Churchman) from sympathy with Scottish 
 Presbyterianism as he was removed in politics 
 from the Liberalism then dominant in Edin- 
 burgh, he won golden opinions from the Scotch, 
 as well as from the crowd of foreign visitors, by 
 the tact and grace he showed in the discharge of 
 his duties, and the skill with which, putting off 
 the politician, he entered into the spirit of the 
 occasion as a lover of letters and learning. 
 Though political eminence had secured his election 
 to the office, every one felt that it would have been 
 
 Q
 
 226 Biographical Studies 
 
 hard to find in the ranks of hterature and science 
 any one fitter to preside over such a gathering. 
 
 He left behind few in whom the capacities 
 of the administrator were so happily blended with 
 a philosophic judgment and a wide culture. It is 
 a combination which was inadequately appreciated 
 in his own person. Vehemence in controversy, 
 domineering audacity of purpose, the power of 
 moving crowds by incisive harangues, were the 
 qualities which the younger generation seemed 
 disposed to cultivate. They are qualities apt to be 
 valued in times of strife and change, times when 
 men are less concerned to study and apply prin- 
 ciples than to rouse the passions and consolidate 
 the organisation of their party, while dazzling the 
 nation by large promises or bold strokes of policy. 
 For such courses Northcote was not the man. 
 Were it to be observed of him that he was too 
 good for the work he had to do, it might be 
 answered that political leadership is work for 
 which no man can be too good, and that it was 
 rather because his force of will and his combative- 
 ness w^ere not commensurate with his other gifts, 
 that those other gifts did not have their full effect 
 and win their due success. Yet this at least may 
 be said, that if he had been less amiable, less fair- 
 minded, and less open-minded, he would have 
 retained his leadership to the end.
 
 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL 
 
 Though I do not propose to write even the briefest 
 narrative of Parnell's life, but only to note certain 
 salient features of his intellect and character, it 
 may be well to state a few facts and dates ; for in 
 these days of rapid change and hasty reading, 
 facts soon pass out of most men's memories, 
 leaving only vague impressions behind/ 
 
 He belonged to a family which, established at 
 Congleton in Cheshire, had at the time of the 
 Restoration migrated to Ireland, had settled on 
 an estate in Wicklow, and had produced in every 
 subsequent generation a person of distinction. 
 Thomas Parnell, the friend of Pope and Swift, 
 is still remembered by his poem of The Ilcniiit. 
 Another Parnell (Sir John) was Chancellor of 
 the Irish Exchequer in the days of Henry 
 Grattan, whose opinions he shared. Another 
 (Sir Henry) was a leading Irish Liberal member 
 of the House of Commons, and died by his 
 own hand in 1842. Charles's father and grand- 
 
 ^ The Life of rariicll, by Mr. R. Barry O'Brien, has laken rank aniuiiL; 
 the best biographies of the last half-ccniur\-. 
 
 227
 
 22 8 Biographical Studies 
 
 father figured less in the public eye. But 
 his mother was a remarkable woman, and 
 the daughter of a remarkable man, Commodore 
 Charles Stewart, one of the most brilliant naval 
 commanders on the American side in the war of 
 1812. Stewart was the son of a Scoto-Irishman 
 from Ulster, who had emigrated to America in 
 the middle of the eighteenth century ; so there 
 was a strain of Scottish as well as a fuller strain 
 of English blood in the most powerful Irish 
 leader of recent times. 
 
 Parnell was born at Avondale, the family estate 
 in Wicklow, in 1846, and was educated mostly at 
 private schools in England. He spent some 
 months at Magdalene College, Cambridge, but, 
 having been rusticated for an affray in the street, 
 refused to return to the College, and finished his 
 education for himself at home. It was a very im- 
 perfect education. He cared nothing for study, 
 and indeed showed interest only in mathematics 
 and cricket. In 1874 he stood as a candidate for 
 Parliament, but without success. When he had to 
 make a speech he broke down utterly. In 1875 he 
 was returned as member for the county of Meath, 
 and within two years had made his mark in the 
 House of Commons. In 1880 he was elected leader 
 of the Irish Parliamentary party, and ruled it and 
 his followers in Ireland with a rod of iron until 
 he was deposed, in 1890, at the instance of 
 the leaders of the English Liberal party, who
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 229 
 
 thought that the verdict against him in a divorce 
 suit in which he was co-respondent had fatally 
 discredited him in the eves of the bulk of the 
 English Liberal party, and made co-operation 
 with him impossible. Refusing to resign his 
 leadership, he conducted a campaign in Ireland 
 against the majority of his former followers with 
 extraordinary energy till October 1891, when he 
 died of rheumatic fever after a short illness. A 
 constitution which had never been strong was 
 worn out by the ceaseless exertions and mental 
 tension of the last twelve months. 
 
 The whole of his political activity was com- 
 prised within a period of sixteen years, during 
 ten of which he led the Irish Nationalist party, 
 exercising an authority more absolute than any 
 Irish leader had exercised before. 
 
 It has often been observed that he was not 
 Irish, and that he led the Irish people with success 
 just because he did not share their characteristic 
 weaknesses. But it is equally true that he was 
 not English. One always felt the difference 
 between his temperament and that of the normal 
 Englishman. The same remark applies to some 
 other famous Irish leaders. Wolfe Tone, for 
 instance, and Fitzgibbon (afterwards Lord Clare) 
 were unlike the usual type of Irishman that is, 
 the Irishman in whom the Celtic element pre- 
 dominates ; but they were also unlike English- 
 men. The Anglo-Irish Protestants, a strong race
 
 230 Biographical Studies 
 
 who have produced a number of remarkable men 
 in excess of the proportion they bear to the 
 whole population of the United Kingdom, fall 
 into two classes the men of North- Eastern 
 Ulster, in whom there is so large an infusion 
 of Scottish blood that they may almost be called 
 " Scotchmen with a difference," and the men 
 of Leinster and Munster, who are true Anglo- 
 Celts. It was to this latter class that Parnell 
 belonged. They are a group by themselves, in 
 whom some of the fire and impulsiveness of the 
 Celt has been blended with some of the firmness, 
 the tenacity, and the close hold upon facts which 
 belong to the Englishman. Mr. Parnell, how- 
 ever, though he might be reckoned to the Anglo- 
 Irish type, was not a normal specimen of it. He 
 was a man whom you could not refer to any 
 category, peculiar both in his intellect and in his 
 character generally. 
 
 His intellect was eminently practical. He 
 did not love speculation or the pursuit of 
 abstract truth, nor had he a taste for literature, 
 still less a delight in learning for its own sake. 
 Even of the annals of Ireland his knowledge 
 was most slender. He had no grasp of constitu- 
 tional questions, and was not able to give any 
 help in the construction of a Home Rule scheme 
 in 1886. His general reading had been scanty, 
 and his speeches show no acquaintance either 
 with history, beyond the commonest facts, or with
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 231 
 
 any other subject connected with politics. Very 
 rarely did they contain a maxim or reflection of 
 general applicability, apart from the particular 
 topic he was discussing. Nor did he ever 
 attempt to give to them the charm of literary 
 ornament. All was dry, direct, and practical, 
 without so much as a graceful phrase or a 
 choice epithet. Sometimes, when addressing a 
 great public meeting, he would seek to rouse the 
 audience by vehement language ; but though there 
 might be a glow of suppressed passion, there were 
 no flashes of imaginative light. Yet he never 
 gave the impression of an uneducated man. 
 His lanoruag-e, thoug-h it lacked distinction, was 
 clear and grammatical. His taste was correct. 
 It was merely that he did not care for any of 
 those things which men of ability comparable to 
 his usually do care for. His only interests, out- 
 side politics, lay in mechanics and engineering 
 and in the development of the material resources 
 of his country. He took pains to manage his 
 estate well, and was specially anxious to make 
 something out of his stone quarries, and to learn 
 what could be done in the way of finding and 
 working minerals. 
 
 Those who observed that he was almost 
 always occupied in examining and attacking the 
 measures or the conduct of those who governed 
 Ireland were apt to think his talent a purely 
 critical one. They were mistaken. Critical.
 
 232 Biographical Studies 
 
 indeed, it was, in a remarkable degree ; keen, 
 penetrating, stringently dissective of the arguments 
 of an opponent, ingenious in taking advantage of 
 a false step in administration or of an admission 
 imprudently made in debate. But It had also a 
 positive and constructive quality. From time to 
 time he would drop his negative attitude and 
 sketch out plans of legislation which were always 
 consistent and weighty, though not made attractive 
 by any touch of imagination. They were the 
 schemes not so much of a statesman as of an able 
 man of business, who saw the facts, especially 
 the financial facts, in a sharp, cold light, and 
 they seldom went beyond what the facts could be 
 made to prove. And his ideas struck one as 
 being not only forcible but independent, the fruit 
 of his own musings. Although he freely used 
 the help of others in collecting facts or opinions, 
 he did not seem to be borrowing the ideas, 
 but rather to have looked at things for him- 
 self, and seen them as they actually were, in 
 their true perspective, not (like many Irishmen) 
 through the mists of sentiment or party feeling. 
 The impression made by one of his more elabo- 
 rate speeches might be compared to that which 
 one receives from a grey sunless day with an east 
 wind, a day in which everything shows clear, but 
 also hard and cold. 
 
 To call his mind a narrow one, as people some- 
 times did, was to wrong it. If the range of his
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 233 
 
 interests was limited, his intelligence was not. 
 Equal to any task it undertook, it judged soundly, 
 appreciating the whole phenomena of the case, 
 men and things that had no sort of attraction 
 for it. There was less pleasure in watching its 
 activities than the observation of a superior 
 mind generally affords, for it was always directed 
 to immediate aims, and it wanted the originality 
 which is fertile in ideas and analofjies. It 
 was not discursive, not versatile, not apt to 
 generalise. It did not rejoice in the exercise of 
 thought for thought's sake, but felt itself to be 
 merely a useful instrument for performing the 
 definite practical work which the will required 
 of it. 
 
 If, however, the intellect of the man could 
 not be called interesting, his character had at 
 least this interest, that it gave one many 
 problems to solve, and could not easily be 
 covered by any formulae. An observer who 
 followed the old method of explaining every 
 man by ascribing to him a single ruling passion, 
 would have said that his ruling passion was 
 pride. The pride was so strong that it 
 almost extinguished vanity. Parnell did not 
 appear to seek occasions for display, frequently 
 neglecting those which other men would have 
 chosen, seldom seeming to be elated by the 
 applause of crowds, and treating the House of 
 Commons with equal coolness whether it cheered
 
 2 34 Biographical Studies 
 
 him or howled at him. He cared nothinsf for 
 any social compliments or attentions, rarely 
 accepted an invitation to dinner, dressed with 
 little care and often in clothes whose style and 
 colour seemed unworthy of his position. He 
 was believed to be haughty and distant to his 
 followers ; and although he could occasionally 
 be kindly and even genial, scarcely any were 
 admitted to intimacy, and few of the ordinary 
 signs of familiarity could be observed between 
 him and them. Towards other persons he was 
 sufficiently polite but warily reserved, show- 
 ing no desire for the cultivation of friend- 
 ship, or, indeed, for any relations but those 
 of business. Of some ordinarv social duties, 
 such as opening and answering letters, he was, 
 especially in later years, more neglectful than 
 good breeding permits ; and men doubted 
 whether to ascribe this fault to indolence or to 
 a superb disregard of everybody but himself 
 Such disregard he often showed in greater 
 matters, taking no notice of attacks made 
 upon him which he might have refuted, and 
 intimating to the English his indifference to 
 their praise or blame. On one remarkable 
 occasion, at the beginning of the session of 
 1883, he was denounced by Mr. W. E. Forster 
 in a long and bitter speech, which told power- 
 fully upon the House. Many instances were 
 given in which Irish members had palliated
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 235 
 
 or failed to condemn criminal acts, and Parnell 
 was arraigned as the head and front of this line 
 of conduct, and thus virtually responsible for the 
 outrages that had occurred. The Irish leader, 
 who had listened in impassive silence, broken 
 only by one interjected contradiction, to this 
 fierce invective, did not rise to reply, and was 
 with difficulty induced by his followers to de- 
 liver his defence on the following day. To the 
 astonishment of every one, that defence con- 
 sisted in a declaration, delivered in a cold, 
 careless, almost scornful way, that for all he 
 said or did in Ireland he held himself respons- 
 ible to his countrymen only, and did not in 
 the least regard what Englishmen thought ot 
 him. It was an answer not of defence but of 
 defiance. 
 
 Even to his countrymen he could on occasion 
 be disdainful, expecting them to defer to his own 
 judgment of his own course. He would some- 
 times remain away from Parliament for weeks 
 together, although important business might be 
 under consideration, perhaps would vanish alto- 
 gether from public ken. Yet this lordly attitude 
 and the air of mystery which surrounded him 
 did not seem to be studied with a view to effect. 
 They were due to his habit of thinking first 
 and chiefly of himself If he desired to indulge 
 his inclinations, he indulged them. Some ex- 
 tremely strong motive of passion or interest might
 
 236 Biographical Studies 
 
 interpose to restrain this desire and stimulate 
 him to an unwelcome exertion ; but no respect 
 for the opinion of others, nor fear of censure 
 from his allies or friends, would be allowed to 
 do so. 
 
 This boundless self-confidence and independ- 
 ence greatly contributed to his success as a leader. 
 His faith in his star inspired a conviction that 
 obstacles whose reality his judgment recognised 
 would ultimately yield to his will, and gave him in 
 moments of crisis an undismayed fortitude which 
 only once forsook him in the panic which was 
 suddenly created by the Phoenix Park murders of 
 May 1882. The confidence which he felt, or ap- 
 peared to feel, reacted upon his party, and became 
 a chief ground of their obedience to him and their 
 belief in his superior wisdom. His calmness, his 
 tenacity, his patience, his habit of listening quietly 
 to every one, but deciding for himself, were all 
 evidences of that resolute will which imposed 
 itself upon the Irish masses no less than upon 
 his Parliamentary following, and secured for him 
 a loyalty in which there was little or nothing of 
 personal affection. 
 
 In these several respects his overweening pride 
 was a source of strength. In another direction, 
 however, it proved a source of weakness. There 
 are men in whom the want of moral principle, 
 of noble emotions, or of a scrupulous conscience 
 and nice sense of honour, is partly replaced by
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 237 
 
 deference to the opinion of their class or of the 
 world. Such men may hold through life a 
 tolerably upright course, neither from the love 
 of virtue nor because they are ambitious and 
 anxious to stand well with those whom they 
 aspire to influence or rule, but because, having 
 a sense of personal dignity, combined with a 
 perception of what pleases or offends man- 
 kind, they are resolved to do nothing whereby 
 their good name can be tarnished or an opening 
 given to malicious tongues. But when pride 
 towers to such a height as to become a law to 
 itself, disregarding the judgment of others, it 
 may not only lead its possessor into an attitude 
 of defiance which the world resents, but may 
 make him stoop to acts of turpitude which dis- 
 credit his character. Mr. Parnell was certainly 
 not a scrupulous man. Without dwelling upon 
 the circumstances attendinof the divorce case 
 already referred to, or upon his betrayal of Mr. 
 Gladstone's confidences, and his reckless appeals 
 during the last year of his life to the most in- 
 flammable elements in Ireland, there are facts 
 enough in his earlier career to show that he had 
 little reofard for truth and little horror for crime. 
 A revolution may extenuate some sins, but even 
 in a revolution there are men (and sometimes 
 the strongest men) whose moral excellence shines 
 through the smoke of conflict and the mists of 
 detraction. In Mr. Parnell's nature the moral
 
 238 Biographical Studies 
 
 element was imperfectly developed. He seemed 
 cynical and callous ; and it was probably his 
 haughty self-reliance which prevented him from 
 sufficiently deferring to the ordinary moralities 
 of mankind. His pride, which ought to have 
 kept him free from the suspicion of dishonour, 
 made him feel himself dispensed from the usual 
 restraints. Whatever he did was right in his 
 own eyes, and no other eyes need be regarded. 
 Phenomena somewhat similar were observable in 
 Napoleon. But Napoleon, though he came of a 
 good family, was obviously not a gentleman in 
 the common sense of the term. Mr. Parnell 
 was a gentleman in that sense. He had the 
 bearing, the manners, the natural easy dignity 
 of a man of birth who has always moved in 
 good society. He rarely permitted any one to 
 take liberties with him, even the innocent liber- 
 ties of familiar intercourse. This made his 
 departures from Avhat may be called the inner 
 and higher standard of gentlemanly conduct all 
 the more remarkable. 
 
 He has been accused of a want of physical 
 courage. He did no doubt after the Phoenix 
 Park murders ask the authorities in Eng-land for 
 police protection, being, not unnaturally, in fear 
 for his life ; and he habitually carried firearms. 
 He was at times in danger, and there was every 
 reason why he should be prepared to defend him- 
 self. An anecdote was told of another member
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 239 
 
 of the House of Commons whose initials were the 
 same as his own, and who, taking what he sup- 
 posed to be his own overcoat from the peg on 
 which it hung in the cloakroom of the House, 
 was startled when he put his hand into the pocket 
 to feel in it the cold iron of a pistol. Moral 
 courage he showed in a high degree during 
 his whole public career, facing his antagonists 
 with an unshaken front, even when they were 
 most numerous and bitter. Though he intensely 
 disliked imprisonment, the terms on which he 
 came out of Kilmainham Gaol left no discredit 
 upon him. He behaved with perfect dignity 
 under the attacks of the press in 1887, and in 
 the face of the use made of letters attributed to 
 him which turned out to have been forged by 
 Richard Pigott letters which the bulk of the 
 English upper classes had greedily swallowed. 
 With this courage and dignity there was, however, 
 little trace of magnanimitv. He seldom said a 
 generous word, or showed himself responsive to 
 such a word spoken by another. Accustomed to 
 conceal his feelings, except in his most excited 
 moments, he rarely revealed, but he certainly 
 cherished, vindictive sentiments. He never for- 
 gave either Mr. W. E. Forster or Mr. Gladstone 
 for having imprisoned him In 1881 ;^ and though 
 
 1 An anecdote was lold at the time that when he found himself in the 
 prison yard at Kilmainham, he said, in a sort of solilorjuy, " I shall live 
 yet to dance upon those :\vo old men's graves."
 
 240 Biographical Studies 
 
 he stood in some awe of the latter, whom he 
 considered the only really formidable antagonist 
 he had ever had to confront, he bore a grudge 
 which smouldered under the reconciliation of 1886 
 and leapt into flame in the manifesto of November 
 1890. 
 
 The union in Mr. Parnell of intense passion 
 with strenuous self-control struck all who watched 
 him closely, though it was seldom that passion 
 so far escaped as to make the contrast visibly 
 dramatic. Usually he was cold, grave, deliberate, 
 repelling advances with a sort of icy courtesy. 
 He hardly ever lost his temper in the House of 
 Commons, even in his last session under the 
 sarcasms of his former friends, though the low, 
 almost hissing tones of his voice sometimes 
 betrayed an internal struggle. But during the 
 electoral campaign in Kilkenny, in December 
 1890, when he was fighting for his life, he was 
 more than once so swept away by anger that 
 those beside him had to hold him back from 
 jumping off the platform into the crowd to strike 
 down some one who had interrupted him. Sus- 
 pended for a moment, his mastery of himself 
 quickly returned. Men were astonished to 
 observe how, after some of the stormy passages 
 at the meetings of Irish members held in one 
 of the House of Commons committee-rooms in 
 December 1890, he would address quietly, per- 
 haps lay his hand upon the shoulder of, some one
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 241 
 
 of the colleagues who had just been denouncing 
 him, and on whom he had poured all the vitriol 
 of his fierce tongue. As this could not have 
 been good -nature, it must have been either 
 calculated policy or a pride that would not 
 accept an injury from those whom he had been 
 wont to deem his subjects. Spontaneous kind- 
 liness was never ascribed to him ; nor had he, 
 so far as could be known, a single intimate 
 friend. 
 
 Oratory is the usual avenue to leadership in a 
 democratic movement, and Mr. Parnell is one of 
 the very few who have arrived at power neither 
 by that road nor by military success. So far 
 from having by nature any of the gifts or graces 
 of a popular speaker, he was at first conspicuously 
 deficient in them, and became at last effective 
 only by constant practice, and by an intellectual 
 force which asserted itself through commonplace- 
 ness of language and a monotonous delivery. 
 Fluency was wanting, and even moderate ease 
 was acquired only after four or five years' practice. 
 His voice was neither powerful nor delicate in its 
 modulations, but it was clear, and the enunciation 
 deliberate and distinct, quiet when the matter 
 was ordinary, slow and emphatic when an import- 
 ant point arrived. With very little action of the 
 body, there was often an interesting and obviously 
 unstudied display of facial expression. So far from 
 glittering with the florid rhetoric supposed to
 
 2^2 Biographical Studies 
 
 characterise Irish eloquence, his speeches were 
 singularly plain, bare, and dry. Neither had 
 they any humour. If they ever raised a smile, 
 which seldom happened, it was by some touch of 
 sarcasm or adroit thrust at a point left unguarded 
 by an adversary. Their merit lay in their 
 lucidity, in their aptness to the matter in hand, 
 in the strong practical sense which ran through 
 them, coupled with the feeling that they came 
 from one who led a nation, and whose forecasts 
 had often fulfilled themselves. They were care- 
 fully prepared, and usually made from pretty 
 full notes ; but the preparation had been given 
 rather to the matter and the arrangement than to 
 the diction, which had rarely any ornament or 
 literary finish. Of late years he spoke infre- 
 quently, whether from indolence or from weak 
 health, or because he thought little was to be 
 done in the face of a hostile majority, now that 
 the tactics of obstruction had been abandoned. 
 When he interposed without preparation in a 
 debate which had arisen unexpectedly, he was 
 short, pithy, and direct ; indeed, nothing was 
 more characteristic of Parnell than his talent 
 for hitting the nail on the head, a talent which 
 always commands attention in deliberative assem- 
 blies. No one saw more clearly or conveyed in 
 terser language the course which the circumstances 
 of the moment required ; and as his mastery of 
 parliamentary procedure and practice came next
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 243 
 
 to that of Mr. Gladstone, any advice that he 
 gave to the House on a point of order carried 
 weiofht. It would indeed be no exao-treration to 
 say that during the sessions of 1889 and 1890 
 he was distinctly the second man in the House 
 of Commons, surpassed in debating power by 
 five or six others, but inferior to Mr. Gladstone 
 alone in the interest which his speeches excited 
 and in the impression they produced. Along 
 with this access of influence his attitude and the 
 spirit of his policy appeared to rise and widen. 
 There was less of that hard attorneyism which 
 had marked his criticisms of the Tory Government 
 and their measures up to March 1S80, and of the 
 Liberal Government and their measures during 
 the five following years. He seemed to grow 
 more and more to the full stature of a statesman, 
 with constructive views and a willinoness to make 
 the best of the facts as he found them. Yet even 
 in this later and better time one note of o;reat- 
 ness was absent from his speeches. There was 
 nothing [^^enial or Q^enerous or elevated about 
 them. They never soared into an atmosphere 
 of lofty feeling, worthy of the man who was by 
 this time deemed to be leading his nation to 
 victory, and who had begun to be admired and 
 honoured by one of the two great historic English 
 parties. 
 
 Parnell was not only versed in the rules of 
 parliamentary procedure, but also a consummate
 
 244 Biographical Studies 
 
 master of parliamentary tactics. Soon after he 
 entered the House of Commons he detected its 
 weak point, and perfected a system of obstruc- 
 tion which so destroyed the efficiency of its time- 
 honoured modes of doing business that new sets 
 of rules, each more stringent than the preceding, 
 had to be devised between 1878 and 1888. The 
 skill with which he handled his small but well- 
 disciplined battalion was admirable. He was 
 strict with individuals, requiring absolute obedi- 
 ence to the party rules, but ready to gratify any 
 prevailing current of feeling when he saw that 
 this could be done without harm to the cause. 
 More than once, when English members who 
 happened to be acting with him on some particular 
 question pressed him to keep his men quiet and 
 let a division be taken at once, he answered that 
 they were doubtless right in thinking that the 
 moment for securing a good division had arrived, 
 but that he must not muzzle his followers when 
 they wanted to have their fling. The best 
 proof of the tact with which he ruled a section 
 comprising many men of brilliant talents lies 
 in the fact that there was no serious revolt, 
 or movement towards revolt, against him until 
 the breach of 1890 between himself and the 
 Liberal party had led to the belief that his con- 
 tinued leadership would mean defeat at the polls 
 in Great Britain, and the postponement, perhaps 
 for many years, of Home Rule for Ireland.
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 245 
 
 Parnell's political views and tendencies were 
 eagerly canvassed by those who had studied 
 him closely. Many, among both Englishmen 
 and Irishmen, held that he was at heart a Con- 
 servative, valuing strong government and attached 
 to the rights of property. They predicted that 
 if an Irish Parliament had been established, as 
 proposed by Mr. Gladstone in 1S86, and an 
 Irish cabinet formed to administer the affairs of 
 the island, Parnell would have been the in- 
 evitable and somewhat despotic leader of the 
 party of authority and order. His co-operation 
 with the agrarian agitators from 1879 onwards 
 was in this view merely a politic expedient to 
 gain support for the Home Rule campaign. For 
 this theory there is much to be said. Though 
 he came to lead a revolution, and was willing, 
 as appeared in the last few months of his life, to 
 appeal to the genuine revolutionary party, Parnell 
 was not by temper or conviction a revolutionist. 
 Those who were left in Ireland of the old Fenian 
 group, and especially that section of the extreme 
 Fenians out of which the secret insurrectionary 
 and dynamitard societies were formed, never 
 liked or trusted him. The passion which origin- 
 ally carried him into public life was hatred of 
 England, and a wish to restore to Ireland, if 
 possible her national independence (though he 
 rarely if ever avowed this), or at least her 
 own Parliament. But he was no democratic
 
 2^6 Biographical Studies 
 
 leveller, and still less inclined to those socialistic 
 doctrines which the section influenced by Mr. 
 Davitt had espoused. He did not desire the 
 "extinction of landlordism," and would prob- 
 ably have been a restraining and moderating 
 force in an Irish legislature. That he was 
 genuinely attached to his native country need not 
 be doubted. But his patriotism had little of a 
 sentimental quality, and seemed to spring as 
 much from dislike of England as from love of 
 Ireland. 
 
 It may excite surprise that a man such as has 
 been sketched, with so cool a judgment and so 
 complete a self-control, a man (as his previous 
 career had shown) able to endure temporary 
 reverses in the confidence of ultimate success, 
 should have committed the fatal error, which 
 blasted his fame and shortened his life, of cling- 
 ing to the headship of his party when prud- 
 ence prescribed retirement. When he sought 
 the advice of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, retirement for 
 a time was the counsel he received. His 
 absence need not have been of long duration. 
 Had he, after the sentence of the Divorce 
 Court in November 1890, gone abroad for 
 eight or ten months, allowing some one to 
 be chosen in his place chairman of the Irish 
 party for the session, he might thereafter have 
 returned to the House of Commons, and would 
 doubtless, after a short lapse of time, have
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 247 
 
 naturally recovered the leadership. No one else 
 could have resisted his claims. Unfortunately, 
 the self-reliant pride which had many a time 
 stood him in good stead, made him refuse to 
 bow to the storm. Probably he could not 
 understand the indignation which the proceed- 
 ings in the divorce case had awakened in 
 England, being morally somewhat callous, and 
 knowing that his offence had been no secret to 
 many persons in the House of Commons, He 
 had been accustomed to despise English opinion, 
 and had on former occasions suffered little 
 for doing so. He bitterly resented both Mr. 
 Gladstone's letter and the movement to depose 
 him which it roused in his own party. Having 
 often before found defiant resolution lead to 
 success, he determined again to rely on the 
 maxim which has beguiled so many to ruin, just 
 because it has so much truth in it " De raitdace, 
 encore de raicdace, toujour s de raudaccT The 
 affront to his pride disturbed the balance of his 
 mind, and made him feel as if even a temporary 
 humiliation would destroy the prestige that had 
 been won by his haughty self-confidence. It 
 was soon evident that he had overestimated his 
 power in Ireland, but when the schism began 
 there were many besides Lord Salisbury many 
 in Ireland as well as in England who predicted 
 triumph for him. Nor must It be thought that 
 it was pure selfishness which made him resolve
 
 248 Biographical Studies 
 
 rather to break with the English Liberals than 
 allow the Nationalist bark to be steered by any 
 hands but his own. He was a fatalist, and had 
 that confidence in his star and his mission which 
 is often characteristic of minds in which super- 
 stition for he was superstitious and a certain 
 morbid taint may be discerned. There were 
 others who believed that no one but himself could 
 hold the Irish party together and carry the Irish 
 cause to triumph. No wonder that this belief 
 should have filled and perhaps disordered his 
 own brain. 
 
 The swiftness of his rise is a striking instance 
 of the power which intellectual concentration and a 
 strenuous will can exert, for he had no adventitious 
 help from wealth or family connection or from 
 the reputation of having suffered for his country. 
 Ergo vivida vis aiiinii pervicit. When he entered 
 Parliament he was only thirty, with no experience 
 of affairs and no gift of speech ; but the quality 
 that was in him of leading and ruling men, of 
 taking the initiative, of seeing and striking at the 
 weak point of the enemy, and fearlessly facing the 
 brunt of an enemy's attack, made itself felt in a 
 few months, and he rose without effort to the first 
 place. With some intellectual limitations and 
 some great faults, he will stand high in the long 
 and melancholy series of Irish leaders : less 
 lofty than Grattan, less romantic than Wolfe 
 Tone, less attractive than O'Connell, less brilliant
 
 Charles Stewart Parnell 249 
 
 than any of these three, yet entitled to be 
 remembered as one of the most remarkable 
 characters that his country has produced in her 
 struggle of many centuries against the larger 
 isle.
 
 CARDINAL MANNING 
 
 Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop of West- 
 minster and Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, 
 was born in 1808, eight years after Cardinal 
 Newman, and died in 1892. He was one of the 
 most notable figures of his generation ; and, in- 
 deed, in a sense, an unique figure, for he con- 
 tributed a new type to the already rich and 
 various ecclesiastical life of England. If he 
 could scarcely be described as intellectually a man 
 of the first order, he held a considerable place 
 in the history of his time, having effected what 
 greater men might perhaps have failed to effect, 
 for the race is not always to the swift, and time 
 and chance favoured Manning. 
 
 He was the son of wealthy parents, his father 
 a City of London merchant ; was educated at 
 Harrow and at Oxford, where he obtained high 
 classical honours and a Fellowship at Merton 
 College ; was ordained a clergyman, and soon rose 
 to be Archdeacon of Chichester ; and, having by 
 degrees been led further and further from his 
 original Low Church position into the Tractarian 
 
 movement, ultimately, at the age of forty-three, 
 
 250
 
 Cardinal Manning 251 
 
 went over to the Church of Rome. Having 
 some time before lost his wife, he was at once 
 re-ordained a priest, was appointed Archbishop 
 of Westminster on Cardinal Wiseman's death in 
 1865, and raised to the Cardinalate by Pope 
 Pius IX, in 1875. 
 
 He was not a great thinker nor a man of 
 wide learning. His writings show no trace of 
 originality, nor indeed any conspicuous philo- 
 sophical acuteness or logical power. So far as 
 purely intellectual gifts are concerned, he was 
 not to be named with Cardinal Newman or with 
 several other of the ablest members of the 
 English Tractarian party, such as were the two 
 metaphysicians W. G. Ward and Dalgairns, both 
 of whom passed over to Rome, or such as was 
 Dean Church, an accomplished historian, and a 
 man of singularly beautiful character, who re- 
 mained an Anglican till his death in 1890. Nor, 
 though he had won a high reputation at his 
 University, was Manning a leading spirit in the 
 famous "Oxford Movement." It was by his win- 
 ning manners, his graceful rhetoric, and his zealous 
 discharge of clerical duties, rather than by any 
 commanding talents that he rose to eminence in 
 the Church of England. Neither had his character 
 the same power either to attract or to awe as that 
 of Newman. Nobody in those days called him 
 great, as men called Newman. Nobody felt 
 compelled to follow where he led. There was
 
 2^2 Biographical Studies 
 
 not, either in his sermons or in his writings, or 
 in his bodily presence and conversation, any- 
 thing which could be pronounced majestic, or 
 lofty, or profound. In short, he was not in the 
 grand style, either as a man or as a preacher, and 
 wanted that note of ethereal purity or passionate 
 fervour which marks the two highest forms of 
 religious character. 
 
 Intelligent, however, skilful, versatile he was 
 in the highest degree ; cultivated, too, with a 
 knowledge of all that a highly educated man 
 ought to know ; dexterous rather than forcible 
 in theological controversy ; an admirable rheto- 
 rician, handling language with something of that 
 kind of art which Roman ecclesiastics most 
 cultivate, and in their possession of which the 
 leading Tractarians showed their affinity to 
 Rome, an exact precision of phrase and a subtle 
 delicacy of suggestion. Newman had it in the 
 fullest measure. Dean Church had it, with less 
 brilliance than Newman, but with no less grace and 
 dignity. Manning equalled neither of these, but 
 we catch in him the echo. He wrote abundantly 
 and on many subjects, always with cleverness 
 and with the air of one who claimed to belong 
 to the dmes d'dlite, yet his style never attained 
 the higher kind of literary merit. There was no 
 imaginative richness about it, neither were there 
 the weight and penetration that come from sus- 
 tained and vigorous thinking. Similarly, with a
 
 Cardinal Manning 253 
 
 certain parade of references to history and to 
 out-of-the-way writers, he gave scant evidence of 
 solid learning. He was an accomplished disputant 
 in the sense of knowing thoroughly the more 
 obvious weaknesses of the Protestant (and especi- 
 ally of the Anglican) position, and of being able 
 to contrast them effectively with the external 
 completeness and formal symmetry of the Roman 
 system. But he never struck out a new or 
 illuminative thought ; and he seldom ventured 
 to face one could indeed sometimes mark him 
 seeking to elude a real difficulty. 
 
 What, then, was the secret of his great and 
 long-sustained reputation and influence ? It lay 
 in his power of dealing with men. For the work 
 of an ecclesiastical ruler he had three inestimable 
 gifts a resolute will, captivating manners, and a 
 tact equally acute and vigilant, by which he 
 seemed not only to read men's characters, but to 
 discern the most effective means of playing on 
 their motives. To call him an intriguer would be 
 unjust, because the word, if it does not imply the 
 pursuit of some mean or selfish object, does 
 generally connote a resort to unworthy arts ; and 
 the Cardinal was neither dishonourable nor selfish. 
 But he had the talents which an intriguer needs, 
 though he used them in a spirit of absolute 
 devotion to the interests of his Church, and though 
 he was too much of a gentleman to think that 
 the interests of the Church, which might justify
 
 2 54 Biographical Studies 
 
 a good deal, could be made to justify any and 
 every means. In conversation he had the art 
 of seeming to lay his mind alongside of yours, 
 wishful to know what you had to say, and 
 prepared to listen respectfully to it, even though 
 you might be much younger and of no personal 
 consequence. Yet you sometimes felt, if your 
 own power of observation had not been lulled to 
 sleep by the winning manner, that he was watch- 
 ing you, and watching, in conformity to a settled 
 habit, the effect upon you of whatever he said. It 
 was hard not to be flattered by this air of kindly 
 deference, and natural to admire the great man 
 who condescended without condescension, even 
 though one might be secretly disappointed at the 
 want of freshness and insight in his conversa- 
 tion. Like his famous contemporary. Bishop 
 Samuel Wilberforce, Manning was all things to 
 all men. He was possessed, no doubt, of far 
 less wit and far less natural eloquence than that 
 brilliant but variable creature. But he gave 
 a more distinct impression of earnest and un- 
 questioning loyalty to the cause he had made his 
 own. 
 
 In the government of his diocese. Manning 
 showed himself a finished ruler and manager of 
 men, flexible in his power of adapting himself to 
 any character or society, yet inflexible when firm- 
 ness was needed, usually tactful if not always 
 gentle in his methods, but tenacious In his pur-
 
 Cardinal Manning 255 
 
 poses, demanding rightfully from others the 
 simplicity of life and the untiring industry 
 of which he set an example himself. Over 
 women his influence was still o-reater than over 
 men, because women are more susceptible to 
 the charm of presence and address ; nor could 
 any other ecclesiastic count so many conversions 
 among ladies of high station, his dignified car- 
 riage and ascetic face according admirably with 
 his sacerdotal rank and his life of strict observ- 
 ance. For some years it was his habit to go to 
 Rome early in Lent and remain till after Easter. 
 Promising subjects, who had doubts as to their 
 probabilities of salvation in the Anglican com- 
 munion, used to be invited to dinner to meet 
 him, and they fell in swift succession before his 
 skilful presentation of the peace and bliss to be 
 found within the Roman fold. 
 
 In his public appearances, it was neither 
 the solid substance of his discourses nor the 
 literary quality of their style that struck one, but 
 their judicious adaptation to the audience, and 
 the grace with which they were delivered. For 
 this reason originality being rarer and therefore 
 more precious in the pulpit, where well-worn 
 themes have to be handled, than on a platform, 
 where the topic is one of the moment his 
 addresses at public meetings were better than his 
 sermons, and won for him the reputation of a 
 speaker whom it was well worth while to secure
 
 256 Biographical Studies 
 
 at any social or philanthropic gathering. At the 
 Vatican QEcumenical Council of 1870 it was less 
 by his speeches than by his work in private among 
 the assembled prelates that he served the In- 
 fallibilist cause. Himself devoted, and, no doubt, 
 honestly devoted, to Ultramontane principles, he 
 did not hesitate to do violence to history and join 
 in destroying what freedom the Church at large 
 had retained, in order to exalt the Chair of Peter 
 to a position unheard of even at Trent, not to say 
 in the Middle Ages. His activity, his assiduity, 
 and his tireless powers of persuasion contri- 
 buted largely to the satisfaction at that Council 
 of the wishes of Pius IX., who presently rewarded 
 him with the Cardinalate. But the opponents of 
 the new dogma, who were as superior in learning 
 to the Infallibilists as they proved inferior in 
 numbers, carried back with them to Germany and 
 North America an undying distrust of the astute 
 Englishman who had shown more than a con- 
 vert's proverbial eagerness for rushing to extremes 
 and forcing others to follow. I remember to 
 have met some of the anti-Infallibilist prelates 
 returning to America in the autumn of 1870; 
 and in our many talks on shipboard they spoke of 
 the Archbishop in terms no more measured than 
 Nestorius may have used of St, Cyril after the 
 Council of Ephesus. 
 
 But Manning's powers shone forth most fully 
 in the course he gave to his policy as Arch-
 
 Cardinal Manning 257 
 
 bishop of Westminster and head of the Roman 
 hierarchy in Britain. He had two difficulties 
 to confront. One was the suspicion of the 
 old English Roman Catholic families, who dis- 
 trusted him as a recent recruit from Protestantism, 
 a man brought up in ideas unfamiliar to their 
 conservative minds. The other was the aversion 
 of the ruling classes in England, and indeed of 
 Englishmen generally, to the pretensions of Rome 
 an aversion which, among the Tories, sprang 
 from deep-seated historical associations, and among 
 the Whigs drew further strength from dislike to 
 the reactionary tendencies of the Popedom on the 
 European continent, and especially its resistance 
 to the freedom and unity of Italy. In 1850 
 the creation by the Pope of a Roman Catholic 
 hierarchy in England, followed by Cardinal 
 W^iseman's letter dated from the Flaminian Gate, 
 had evoked a burst of anti-papal feeling which 
 never quite subsided during Wiseman's lifetime. 
 Both these enmities Manning overcame. The 
 old Catholic families rallied to a prelate who 
 supported with dignity and vigour the pretensions 
 of their church ; while the suspicions of Protest- 
 ants were largely, if not universally, allayed 
 when they noted the attitude of a patriotic 
 Englishman, zealous for the greatness of his 
 country, which the Archbishop assumed, as well 
 as the heartiness with which he threw himself 
 
 into moral and philanthropic causes. Loyalty to 
 
 s
 
 258 Biographical Studies 
 
 Rome never betrayed him into any apparent 
 disloyalty to England. Too prudent to avow 
 sympathy with either political party, he seemed 
 less opposed to Liberalism than his predecessor 
 had been or than most of the English Catholics 
 were. While, of course, at issue with the Liberal 
 party upon educational questions, he was believed 
 to lean to Home Rule, and maintained good rela- 
 tions with the Irish leaders. He joined those 
 who worked for the better protection of children 
 and the repression of vice, advocated total abstin- 
 ence by precept and example, and did much to 
 promote it among the poorer Roman Catholic 
 population. Discerning the growing magnitude 
 of what are called labour questions, he did not 
 recoil from proposals to limit by legislation the 
 hours of toil, and gladly exerted himself to settle 
 differences between employers and workmen, 
 showing his own sympathy with the needs and 
 hardships of the latter. Thus he won a popu- 
 larity with the London masses greater than any 
 prelate of the Established Church had enjoyed, 
 while the middle and upper classes noted with 
 pleasure that, however Ultramontane in his 
 theology, he always spoke and wrote as an 
 Englishman upon non-theological subjects. 
 
 In this there was no playing of a part, for he 
 sincerely cared about temperance, the welfare of 
 children, the advancement of the labouring class, 
 and the greatness of England. But there was
 
 Cardinal Manning 259 
 
 also a sage perception of the incidental service 
 which his attitude in these matters could render 
 to his church ; and he relished opportunities of 
 proving that a Catholic prelate could be not only 
 a philanthropist but also a patriot. He saw the 
 value of the attitude, though he used it honestly, 
 and if he was not artful, he was full of art. 
 Truth, for its own sake, he neither loved nor 
 sought, but, having once adopted certain conclu- 
 sions, doctrinal and practical, subordinated every- 
 thing else to them. Power he loved, yet not wholly 
 for the pleasure which he found in exerting it, but 
 also because he knew that he was fit to use it. 
 and could use it, to promote the aims he cherished. 
 To his church he was devoted heart and soul ; nor 
 could any one have better served it so far as 
 England was concerned. No one in our time, 
 hardly even Cardinal Newman, has done so much 
 to sap and remove the old Protestant fears and 
 jealousies of Rome, fears and jealousies which 
 had descended from days when they were less 
 unreasonable than the liberality or indifference 
 of our times will allow. Truly the Roman 
 Church is a wonderful institution, fertile beyond 
 any other, since in each succeeding age she has 
 given birth to new types of force suited to the 
 conditions she has to deal with. In Manning she 
 developed a figure full of a kind of charm and 
 strength which could hardly have found due 
 scope within a Protestant body: a man who never
 
 2 6o Biographical Studies 
 
 obtruded a claim, yet never yielded one ; who 
 was the loyal servant of a spiritual despotism, 
 yet apparently in sympathy with democratic ideas 
 and movements ; equally welcome among the 
 poorest Irish of his diocese and at the gatherings 
 of the great ; ready to join in every good work 
 with those most opposed to his own doctrines, 
 yet standing detached as the austere and unbend- 
 ing representative of a world-embracing power. 
 
 Since these pages were written there has 
 appeared a Life of Cardinal Manning which, for 
 the variety and interest of its contents, and for the 
 flood of light which it throws upon its subject, 
 deserves to rank among the best biographies in 
 the English language. It reveals the inner life 
 of Manning, his high motives and his tortuous 
 methods, his piety and his aspirations, his occa- 
 sional lapses from sincerity and rectitude, with a 
 fulness to which one can scarcely find a parallel. 
 As was remarked by Mr. Gladstone, who was so 
 keenly interested in the book that for months he 
 could talk of little else, it leaves nothing for the 
 Day of Judgment. 
 
 It would be idle to deny that Manning's 
 reputation did in some measure suffer. Yet it 
 must in fairness be remembered that an ordeal 
 such as that to which he has been thus subjected 
 is seldom applied, and might, if similarly applied, 
 have lowered many another reputation. Cicero
 
 Cardinal Manning 261 
 
 has suffered in like manner. We should have 
 thought more highly of him, though I do not 
 know that we should have liked him better, if his 
 letters had not survived to reveal weaknesses 
 which other men, or their biographers, were dis- 
 creet enough to conceal. 
 
 I have not attempted to rewrite the preceding 
 pages in the light of Mr. Purcell's biography, for 
 to do so v/ould have extended them beyond the 
 limits of a sketch. I have, moreover, found that 
 the disclosures contained in the biography do not 
 oblige me to darken the colours of the sketch 
 itself Taken all in all, these intimate records of 
 Manning's life tend to confirm the view that, along 
 with his love of power and pre-eminence, along 
 with his carelessness about historic truth, along 
 with the questionable methods he sometimes 
 allowed himself to use, there lay deep in his heart 
 a genuine and unfailing sympathy with many 
 good causes, such as the cause of temperance, 
 and a real tenderness for the poor and for 
 children. If he was far removed from a saint, 
 still less was he the mere worldly ecclesiastic, 
 crafty and ambitious, who has in all ages been 
 a familiar and unlovely type of character.
 
 EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN^ 
 
 Edward Freeman was born at Harborne in 
 South Staffordshire on 2nd August 1823, and 
 died at AHcante on i6th March 1892, in the 
 course of an archaeological and historical journey 
 to the east and south of Spain, whither he had 
 gone to see the sites of the early Carthaginian 
 settlements. His life was comparatively un- 
 eventful, as that of learned men in our time 
 usually is. He was educated at home and at a 
 private school till he went to Oxford at the age 
 of eighteen. There he was elected a scholar of 
 Trinity College in 1841, took his degree (second 
 class in literae humaniores) in 1845, and was 
 elected a fellow of Trinity shortly afterwards. 
 Marrying in 1847, ^^ ^^^^ ^^^ fellowship, and 
 settled in 1848 in Gloucestershire, and at a later 
 time went to live in Monmouthshire, whence 
 he migrated in i860 to Somerleaze, a pretty 
 spot about a mile and a half to the north- 
 
 ^ An excellent Life of Freeman has been written by his friend Mr. 
 W. R. W. Stephens, afterwards Dean of Winchester, whose death while 
 these pages were passing through the press has caused the deepest regret 
 to all who had the opportunity of knowing his literary gifts and his 
 lovable character. 
 
 262
 
 Edward Freeman 263 
 
 west of Wells in Somerset. Here he lived 
 till 1884, when he was appointed (on the re- 
 commendation of Mr. Gladstone) to the Regius 
 Professorship of Modern History at Oxford. 
 Thenceforth he spent the winter and spring in 
 the University, returning for the long vacation 
 to Somerleaze, a place he dearly loved, not only 
 in respect of the charm of the surrounding 
 scenery, but from its proximity to the beautiful 
 churches of Wells and to many places of histori- 
 cal interest. For the greater part of his manhood 
 his surroundings were those of a country gentle- 
 man, nor did he ever reconcile himself to town 
 life, for he loved the open sky, the fields and hills, 
 and all wild creatures, though he detested what 
 are called field sports, knew nothing of natural 
 history, and had neither taste nor talent for 
 farming. As he began life with an income suf- 
 ficient to make a gainful profession unnecessary, 
 he did not prepare himself for any, but gave free 
 scope from the first to his taste for study and 
 research. Thus the record of his life is, with the 
 exception of one or two incursions into the field 
 of practical politics, a record of his historical work 
 and of the journeys he undertook in connection 
 with it. 
 
 History was the joy as well as the labour of 
 his life. But the conception he took of it was 
 peculiar enough to deserve some remark. The 
 keynote of his character was the extraordinary
 
 264 Biographical Studies 
 
 warmth of his interest in the persons, things, and 
 places which he cared for, and the scarcely less 
 conspicuous indifference to matters which lay 
 outside the well-defined boundary line of his sym- 
 pathies. If any branch of inquiry seemed to him 
 directly connected with history, he threw himself 
 heartily into it, and drew from it all it could be 
 made to yield for his purpose. About other sub- 
 jects he would neither read nor talk, no matter 
 how completely they might for the time be filling 
 the minds of others. While an undergraduate, 
 and influenced, like most of the abler men among 
 his Oxford contemporaries, by the Tractarian 
 opinions and sentiments then in their full force 
 and freshness,^ he became interested in church 
 architecture, discerned the value which architec- 
 ture has as a handmaid to historical research, set 
 to work to study mediseval buildings, and soon 
 acquired a wonderfully full and exact knowledge 
 of the most remarkable churches and castles all 
 over England. He taught himself to sketch, not 
 artistically, but sufficiently well to record charac- 
 teristic points, and by the end of his life he had 
 
 1 The scholars of Trinity were then (1843) ^'^ High Churchmen, 
 and never dined in hall on Fridays. Fourteen years later there was not a 
 single High Churchman among them. Ten or fifteen years afterwards 
 Anglo-Catholic sentiment was again strong. Freeman said that his revul- 
 sion against Tractarianism began from a conversation with one of his 
 fellow-scholars, who had remarked that it was a pity there had been a 
 flaw in the consecration of some Swedish bishops in the si.vteenth century, 
 for this had imperilled the salvation of all Swedes since that time. lie 
 was startled, and began to reconsider his position.
 
 Edward Freeman 265 
 
 accumulated a collection of hundreds of drawings 
 made by himself of notable buildings in France, 
 Germany, Italy, and Dalmatia, as well as in the 
 British Isles. Architecture was always thence- 
 forward to him the prime external record and 
 interpreter of history. But it was the only art in 
 which he took the slightest interest. He cared 
 nothing for pictures or statuary ; was believed 
 to have once only, when his friend J. R. Green 
 dragged him thither, visited a picture-gallery in 
 the course of his numerous journeys ; and did not 
 seem to perceive the significance which paintings 
 have as revealinir the thouehts and social con- 
 dition of the time which produced them. Another 
 branch of inquiry cognate to history which he 
 prized was comparative philology. With no 
 great turn for the refinements of classical 
 scholarship, and indeed with some contempt for 
 the practice of Latin and Greek verse-making 
 which used to absorb much of the time and 
 labour of undergraduates and their tutors at 
 Oxford and Cambridge, he was extremely fond 
 of tracing words through different languages so 
 as to establish the relations of the peoples who 
 spoke them, and, indeed, used to argue that all 
 teaching of languages ought to begin with 
 Grimm's law, and to base his advocac\- of the 
 retention of Greek as a si)ie (]ua iioii for an Arts 
 degree in the University on the im[jortance of 
 that law. But with this love for philology as an
 
 266 Biographical Studies 
 
 instrument in the historian's hands, he took Httle 
 pleasure in languages simply as languages that 
 is to say, he did not care to master, and was not 
 apt at mastering, the grammar and idioms of a 
 tongue. French was the only foreign language 
 he spoke with any approach to ease, though he 
 could read freely German, Italian, and modern 
 Greek, and on his tour in Greece made some 
 vigorous speeches to the people in their own 
 tongue. He had learnt to pronounce Greek in the 
 modern fashion, which few Englishmen can do ; 
 but how much of his classically phrased discourses 
 did the crowds that acclaimed the distinguished 
 Philhellene understand ? So too he was a keen 
 and well -trained archaeologist, but only because 
 archaeology was to him a priceless adjunct one 
 might almost say the most trustworthy source 
 of the study of early history. As evidence of 
 his accomplishments as an antiquary I cannot do 
 better than quote the words of a master of that 
 subject, who was also one of his oldest friends. 
 Mr. George T. Clark says: 
 
 He was an accurate observer, not only of the broad 
 features of a country but of its ancient roads and earthworks, 
 its prehistoric monuments, and its earlier and especially its 
 ecclesiastical buildings. No man was better versed in the 
 distinctive styles of Christian architecture, or had a better 
 general knowledge of the earthworks from the study of which 
 he might hope to correct or corroborate any written records, 
 and by the aid of which he often infused life and reality into 
 otherwise obscure narrations. . . . He visited every spot upon
 
 Edward Freeman 267 
 
 which the Conqueror is recorded to have set his foot, com- 
 pared many of the strongholds of his followers with those 
 they left behind them in Normandy, and studied the evidence 
 of Domesday for their character and possessions. When 
 writing upon Rufus he spent some time in examining the 
 afforested district of the New Forest, and sought for traces of 
 the villages and churches said to have been depopulated or 
 destroyed. And for us archaeologists he did more than this. 
 When he attended a provincial congress and had listened to 
 the description of some local antiquity, some mound, or 
 divisional earthbank, or semi-Saxon church, he at once strove 
 to show the general evidence to be deduced from them, and 
 how it bore upon the boundaries or formation of some Celtic 
 or Saxon province or diocese, if not upon the general history 
 of the kingdom itself. . . . He thus did much to elevate the 
 pursuits of the archaeologist, and to show the relation they 
 bore to the far superior labours of the historian. 
 
 Freeman was always at his best when in the field. It was 
 then that the full force of his personality came into play : his 
 sturdy upright figure, sharp-cut features, flowing beard, well- 
 modulated voice, clear enunciation, and fluent and incisive 
 speech. None who have heard him hold forth from the steps 
 of some churchyard cross, or from the top stone of some half- 
 demolished cromlech, can ever cease to have a vivid recollec- 
 tion of both the orator and his theme. 
 
 Freeman took endless pains to master the topo- 
 graphy of any phice he had to deal with. When 
 at work in his later years on Sicilian history he 
 visited, and he has minutely described, the site of 
 nearly every spot in that island where a battle 
 or a siege took place in ancient times, so that 
 his volumes have become an elaborate historical 
 guide-book for the student or tourist. 
 
 But while he thus delighted in whatever bore 
 upon history as he conceived it, his conception
 
 268 Biographical Studies 
 
 was one which belonged to the eighteenth century 
 rather than to our own time. It was to him not 
 only primarily but almost exclusively a record 
 of political events that is to say, of events in 
 the sphere of war, diplomacy, and government. 
 He expressed this view with concise vigour in 
 the well-known dictum, " History is past politics, 
 and politics is present history " ; and though his 
 friends remonstrated with him against this view 
 as far too narrow, excluding from the sphere 
 of history many of its deepest sources of in- 
 terest, he would never give way. That his- 
 torians should care as much (or more) for the 
 religious or philosophical opinions of an age, or 
 for its ethical and social phenomena, or for the 
 studv of its economic conditions, as for forms 
 of government or battles and sieges, seemed to 
 him strange. He did not argue against the 
 friends who differed from him, for he was ready 
 to believe that there must be something true and 
 valuable in the views of a man whom he re- 
 spected ; but he could not be induced to devote 
 his own labours to the elucidation of these 
 matters. He would say to Green, "You may 
 bring in all that social and religious kind of 
 thing, Johnny, but I can't." So when he went 
 to deliver lectures in the United States, he de- 
 lighted in making new acquaintances there, and 
 was interested in the Federal system and in all 
 institutions which he could trace to their English
 
 Edward Freeman 269 
 
 originals, but did not care to see anything or 
 hear anything about the economic development 
 or social life of the country. 
 
 The same predominant liking for the political 
 element in history made him indifferent to many 
 kinds of literature. It may indeed be said that 
 literature, simply as literature, did not attract 
 him. In his later years, at any rate, he seldom 
 read a book except for the sake of the political or 
 historical information it contained. Among the 
 writers whom he most disliked were Plato, Car- 
 lyle, and Ruskin, in no one of whom could he see 
 any merit, Plato, he said, was the only author 
 he had ever thrown to the other end of the room. 
 Neither, although very fond of the Greek and 
 Roman classics generally, did he seem to enjoy 
 any of the Greek poets except Homer and Pindar 
 and, to some extent, Aristophanes. His liking 
 for Pindar used to surprise us, because Pindar is 
 peculiarly the favourite poet of poetical minds ; 
 and I suspect it was not so much the splendour of 
 Pindar's style and the wealth of his imagination 
 that Freeman enjoyed, as rather the profusion of 
 historical and mythological references. He was 
 impatient with the Greek tragedians, and still 
 more impatient with Virgil, because (as he said) 
 "Virgil cannot or will not say a thing simply." 
 Among English poets his preference was for 
 the old heroic ballads, such as the songs of 
 Brunanburh and Maldon, and, among recent
 
 270 Biographical Studies 
 
 writers, for Macaulay's Lays. The first thing 
 he ever published (1850) was a volume of verse, 
 consisting mainly of ballads, some of them very 
 spirited, on events in Greek and Moorish history. 
 It may be doubted if he remembered a line of 
 Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, or Tennyson. He 
 blamed Walter Scott for misrepresenting history 
 in Ivanhoe, but constantly read the rest of his 
 stories, taking special pleasure in Peveril of the 
 Peak. He bestowed warm praise upon Romola, 
 on one occasion reading it through twice in a 
 single journey. Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton, 
 Marry at's Peter Simple, Trollope's The Warden 
 and Barchester Towers, were amongst his 
 favourites. Among the moderns, Macaulay was 
 his favourite prose author, and he was wont to 
 say that from Macaulay he had learned never 
 to be afraid of using the same word to describe 
 the same thing, and that no one was a better 
 model to follow in the choice of pure English. 
 Limitations of taste are not uncommon among 
 eminent men. W^hat was uncommon in Free- 
 man was the perfect frankness with which he 
 avowed his aversions, and the absence of any 
 pretence of caring for things which he did not 
 really care for. He was in this, as in all other 
 matters, a singularly simple and truthful man, 
 never seeking to appear different from what he 
 was, and finding it hard to understand why other 
 people should not be equally simple and direct.
 
 Edward Freeman 271 
 
 This directness made him express himself with 
 an absence of reserve which often gave offence. 
 Positive and definite, with a strong broad logic 
 which every one could follow, he was a for- 
 midable controversialist even on subjects outside 
 history. A good specimen of his powers was 
 given in the argument against the cruelty of 
 field sports which he carried on wuth Anthony 
 Trollope. His cause was not a popular one in 
 England, but he stated it so well as to carry off 
 the honours of the fray.^ 
 
 The restriction of his interest to a few topics 
 wide ones, to be sure seemed to increase the 
 intensity of his devotion to those few ; and thus 
 even the two chief practical interests he had in 
 life connected themselves with his conception of 
 
 ' Having had about the same time a brush witli George Anthony 
 Denison (Archdeacon of Taunton), and a less friendly passage of arms with 
 James Anthony Froude, he wrote to me in 1870 : "I am greater than 
 Cicero, who was smiter of one Antonius. I venture to think that I have 
 whopped the whole Gens Antonia first Anthony pure and simple, which 
 is Trollope ; secondly, James Anthony, whom I believe myself to have 
 smitten, as Cnut did Eadric swide rihtlice, in the matter of St. Hugh ; 
 thirdly, George Anthony, with whom I fought again last Tuesday, carrying 
 at our Education Board a resolution in favour of Forster's bill." Trollope 
 and he became warm friends. Froude he heartily disliked, noi, I think, 
 on any personal grounds, but because he thought Froude indifferent to 
 truth, and was incensed by the defence of Henry VHI.'s crimes. 
 
 It may be added that Freeman, much as he detested Henry \TH., used 
 to observe that Henry had a sort of legal conscience, because he always 
 wished his murders to be done l)y Act of Parliament, and that the earlier 
 and better part of Henry's reign ouglil not to be forgotten. He \sas fond of 
 quoting the euphemism with which an old Oxford professor of ecclesiastical 
 history concluded his account of the sovereign whom, in respect of his rela- 
 tion to the Church of England, it seemed proper to handle gently : " The 
 later years of this great monarch were clouded by domestic troubles."'
 
 2'12 Biographical Studies 
 
 history. One was the discharge of his duties as 
 a magistrate in the local government of his county. 
 While he lived at Somerleaze he rarely missed 
 Quarter Sessions, speaking seldom, but valuing 
 the opportunity of taking part in the rule of the 
 shire. The other was the politics of the time, 
 foreign politics even more than domestic. He 
 was from an early age a strong Liberal, throw- 
 ing himself into every question which bore on 
 the Constitution, either in state or in church, for 
 (as has been said) topics of the social or economic 
 kind lay rather out of his sphere. When Mr. 
 Gladstone launched his Irish Home Rule scheme 
 in 1886, Freeman espoused it warmly, and praised 
 it for the very point which drew most censure 
 even from Liberals, the removal of the Irish 
 members from Parliament. He was intensely 
 English and Teutonic, and wished the Gael to 
 be left to settle, or fight over, their own affairs in 
 their own island, as they had done eight centuries 
 ago. Even the idea of separating Ireland alto- 
 gether from the English Crown would not have 
 alarmed him, for he did not thank Strongbow 
 and Henry II. for having invaded it; while, on 
 the other hand, the plan of turning the United 
 Kingdom into a federation, giving to England, 
 Scotland, Ireland, and Wales each a local parlia- 
 ment of its own, with an imperial parliament 
 for common concerns, shocked all his historical 
 instincts.
 
 Edward Freeman 273 
 
 In 1859 he was on the point of coming 
 forward as a parHamentary candidate for the 
 borough of Newport in Monmouthshire, and 
 again at the election of 1868 he actually did 
 stand for one of the divisions of Somerset, and 
 showed in his platform speeches a remarkable gift 
 of eloquence, and occasionally, also, of humour, 
 coupled with a want of those minor arts which 
 usually contribute more than eloquence does to 
 success in electioneering. I went round with 
 him, along with his and my friend Mr. Albert 
 Dicey, and few are the candidates who get so 
 much pleasure out of a contest as Freeman did. 
 He was a strenuous advocate of disestablishment 
 in Ireland, the question chiefly at issue in the 
 election of 1868, because he thought the Roman 
 Catholic Church was of right, and ought by law 
 to be, the national Church there ; but no less 
 decidedly opposed to disestablishment in England, 
 where it would have pained him to see the up- 
 rooting of a system entwined with the ideas and 
 events of the Middle Ages. In his later years 
 he told me that if the Liberal party took up the 
 policy of disestablishment in Wales, he did not 
 know whether he could adhere to them, much as 
 he desired to do so. 
 
 Similarly he disliked all schemes for drawing 
 the colonies into closer relations with the United 
 Kingdom, and even seemed to wish that they 
 should sever themselves from it, as the United 
 
 T
 
 2 74 Biographical Studies 
 
 States had done. This view sprang partly from 
 his feeling that they were very recent acquisitions, 
 with which the old historic England had nothing 
 to do, partly also from the impression made 
 on him by the analogy of the Greek colonies. 
 He held that the precedent of the Greek 
 settlements showed the true and proper relation 
 between a " metropolis," or mother-city, and her 
 colonies to be one not of political dependence or 
 interdependence, but of cordial friendliness and a 
 disposition to render help, nothing more. These 
 instances are worth citing because they illustrate 
 a remarkable difference between his way of look- 
 ing historically at institutions and Macaulay's way. 
 A friend of his (the late Mr. S. R. Gardiner), 
 like Freeman a distinguished historian, and like 
 him a strong Home Ruler, wrote to me upon this 
 point as follows : 
 
 Freeman and Macaulay are alike in the higli value they 
 set upon parliamentary institutions. On the other hand, when 
 Macaulay wants to make you understand a thing, he compares 
 it with that which existed in his own day. The standard 
 of the present is always with him. Freeman traces it to 
 its origin, and testifies to its growth. The strength of this 
 mode of proceeding in an historian is obvious. Its weak- 
 ness is that it does not help him to appreciate statesmanship 
 looking forward and trying to find a solution of difficult 
 problems. Freeman's attitude is that of the people who 
 cried out for the good laws of King Edward, trying to revive 
 the past. 
 
 Freeman was apt to go beyond his own 
 dictum about history and politics, for he some-
 
 Edward Freeman 275 
 
 times made history present politics as well as 
 past. 
 
 By far the strongest political interest indeed 
 it rose to a passion of his later years was his 
 hatred of the Turk. In it his historical and 
 religious sentiment, for there was a good deal 
 of the Crusader about him, was blended with 
 his abhorrence of despotism and cruelty. Ever 
 since the beginning of the Crimean war he had 
 been opposed to the traditional English policy of 
 supporting the Sultan. Ever since he had thought 
 about foreign politics at all he had sympathised 
 with the Christians of the East. So when Lord 
 Beaconsfield seemed on the point of carrying the 
 country into a war with Russia in defence of the 
 Turks, no voice rose louder or bolder than his in 
 denouncing the policy then popular with the 
 upper classes in England. On this occasion he 
 gave substantial proof of his earnestness by 
 breaking off his connection with the Saturday 
 Review because it had espoused the Turkish 
 cause. This cost him ^600 a year, a sum 
 he could ill spare, and took from him what had 
 been the joy of his heart, opportunities of deliver- 
 ing himself upon all sorts of current questions. 
 But his sense of duty forbade him to write for a 
 journal which was supporting a misguided policy 
 and a minister whom he thought unscrupulous. 
 
 His habit of speaking out his whole mind 
 with little regard to the eftect his words might
 
 276 Biographical Studies 
 
 produce, or to the way in which they might 
 be twisted, sometimes landed him in difficulties. 
 One utterance raised an outcry at the time, be- 
 cause it was made at a conference held in London 
 in December 1876 to oppose Lord Beaconsfield's 
 Eastern policy. The Duke of Westminster and 
 Lord Shaftesbury presided at the forenoon and 
 afternoon sessions, and the meeting, which told 
 powerfully on the country, was wound up by Mr. 
 Gladstone, Freeman's speech, only ten minutes 
 long, but an oratorical success at the moment, con- 
 tained the words, "Perish the interests of England, 
 perish our dominion in India, rather than that we 
 should strike one blow or speak one word on be- 
 half of the wrong against the right." This flight 
 of rhetoric was perverted by his opponents into 
 "Perish India"; and though he indignantly 
 repudiated the misrepresentation, it continued to 
 be repeated against him for years thereafter, and 
 to be cited as an instance of the irresponsible 
 violence of the friends of the Eastern Christians. 
 
 The most conspicuous and characteristic merits 
 of Freeman as an historian may be summed up 
 in six points : love of truth, love of justice, in- 
 dustry, common sense, breadth of view, and 
 power of vividly realising the political life of the 
 past. 
 
 Every one knows the maxim, pectus facit 
 theologum^ a maxim accountable, by the way, 
 
 1 " The heart makes the theologian."
 
 Edward Freeman 277 
 
 for a good deal of weak theology. More truly 
 may it be said that the merits of a great historian 
 are far from lying wholly in his intellectual 
 powers. Among the highest of such merits, 
 merits which the professional student has even 
 more reason to appreciate than the general reader, 
 because he more frequently discerns the disturbing 
 causes, are two moral qualities. One is the zeal 
 for truth, with the willingness to undertake, in a 
 search for it, a toil by which no credit will ever 
 be gained. The other is a clear view of, and 
 loyal adherence to, the permanent moral standards. 
 In both these points Freeman stood in the front 
 rank. He was kindly and fair in his judgments, 
 and ready to make all the allowances for any 
 man's conduct which the conditions of his time 
 suggested, but he hated cruelty, falsehood, oppres- 
 sion, whether in Syracuse twenty-four centuries 
 ago or in the Ottoman empire to-day. That 
 conscientious industry which spares no pains to 
 get as near as possible to the facts never failed 
 him. Though he talked less about facts and 
 verities than Carlyle did, Carlyle was not so 
 assiduous and so minutely careful in sifting every 
 statement before he admitted it into his pages. 
 That he was never betrayed by sentiment into 
 partisanship it would be too much to say. 
 Scottish critics have accused him, perhaps not 
 without justice, of being led by his English 
 patriotism to over-state the claims of the English
 
 278 Biographical Studies 
 
 Crown to suzerainty over Scotland. J. R. Green, 
 as well as the late Mr. C. H. Pearson, thought 
 that the same cause disposed him to overlook 
 the weak points in the character of Harold son 
 of Godwin, one of his favourite heroes. But 
 there have been few writers who have so seldom 
 erred in this way ; few who have striven so 
 earnestly to do full justice to every cause and 
 every person. Even the race prejudices which 
 he allowed himself to indulge, in letters and talk, 
 against Irishmen, Frenchmen, and Jews, scarcely 
 ever appear in his books. The characters he 
 has drawn of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, William 
 the Conqueror and William the Red, St. Thomas 
 of Canterbury (none of whom he liked), and, in 
 his History of Sicily, of Nicias, are models of the 
 fairness which historical portraiture requires. It 
 is especially interesting to compare his picture 
 of the unfortunate Athenian with the equally 
 vigorous but harsher view of Grote. Freeman, 
 whom many people thought fierce, was one of 
 the most soft-hearted of men, and tolerant of 
 everything but perfidy and cruelty. Though 
 disposed to be positive in his opinions, he was 
 always willing to reconsider a point when any 
 new evidence was discovered or any new argu- 
 ment brought to his notice, and not unfrequently 
 modified his view in the light of such evidence 
 or arguments. It was this passion for accuracy 
 and for that lucidity of statement which is the
 
 Edward Freeman 279 
 
 necessary adjunct of real accuracy, that made him 
 deal so sternly with confused thinkers and careless 
 writers. Carelessness seemed to him a moral 
 fault, because a fault which true conscientiousness 
 excludes. So also clearness of conception and 
 exact precision in the use of words were so 
 natural to him, and appeared so essential to good 
 work, that he would set down the want of them 
 rather to indolence than to incapacity, and apply 
 to them a proportionately severe censure. Mere 
 ignorance he could pardon, but when it was, as 
 often happens, even in persons of considerable 
 pretensions, joined to presumption, his wrath was 
 the hotter because he deemed it a wholly righteous 
 wrath. Never touching any subject which he had 
 not mastered, he thought it his duty as a critic to 
 expose impostors, and rendered in this way, during 
 the years when he wrote for the Saturday Review, 
 services to English scholarship second only to 
 those which were embodied in his own treatises. 
 It must be confessed that he enjoyed the work, 
 and, like Samuel Johnson, was not displeased 
 to be told that he had "tossed and gored several 
 persons." 
 
 His determination to get to the bottom of a 
 question was the cause of the censure he so freely 
 bestowed both on lawyers, who were wont to 
 rest content with their technicalities, and not go 
 back to the historical basis on which those techni- 
 calities rested, and on politicians who fell into
 
 2 So Biographical Studies 
 
 the habit of using stock phrases which muddled 
 or misrepresented the principles involved. The 
 expression "national property," as applied to 
 tithes, incensed him, and gave occasion for some 
 of his most vigorous writing. So the common- 
 place grumblings against the presence of bishops 
 in the House of Lords, which may be heard from 
 people who acquiesce in the presence of hereditary 
 peers, led him to give the most clear and forcible 
 statement of the origin and character of that House 
 which our time has produced. Here he was on 
 ground he knew thoroughly. But his habits of 
 accuracy were not less fully illustrated by his atti- 
 tude towards branches of history he had not ex- 
 plored. With a profound and minute knowledge 
 of English history down to the fourteenth century, 
 so far as his aversion to the employment of 
 manuscript authorities would allow, and a scarcely 
 inferior knowledge of foreign European history 
 during the same period, with a less full but very 
 sound knowledge down to the middle of the 
 sixteenth century, and with a thorough mastery 
 of pretty nearly all ancient history, his familiarity 
 with later European history, and with the history 
 of such outlying regions as India or America, 
 was not much beyond that of the average educated 
 man. He used to say when questioned on these 
 matters that "he had not come down to that 
 yet." But when he had occasion to refer to those 
 periods or countries, he hardly ever made a
 
 Edward Freeman 281 
 
 mistake. If he did not know, he did not refer; 
 if he referred, he had seized, as if by instinct, 
 something which was really important and service- 
 able for his purpose. The same remark applies 
 (speaking generally) to Gibbon and to Macaula)', 
 and I have heard Freeman make it of the writings 
 of Mr. Goldwin Smith, for whom he had a warm 
 admiration. 
 
 Freeman's abstention from the use of manu- 
 script sources was virtually prescribed by his 
 persistence in refusing to work out of his own 
 library, or, as he used to say, out of a room 
 which he could consider to be his library for the 
 time being. As, however, the original authori- 
 ties for the times with which he chiefly dealt 
 are, with few or unimportant exceptions, all in 
 print, this habit can hardly be considered a 
 defect in his historical qualifications. In hand- 
 ling the sources he was a judicious critic and a 
 sound scholar, thoroughly at home in Greek and 
 Latin, and sufficiently equipped in Anglo-Saxon, 
 or, as he called it, Old English. Of his breadth 
 of view, of the command he had of the whole 
 sweep of his knowledge, of his delight in bringing 
 together things the most remote in place or time, 
 it is superfluous to speak. These merits are 
 perhaps most conspicuously seen in the plan of 
 his treatise on Federal Government, as well as 
 in the execution of that one volume which un- 
 fortunately was all he produced of what might
 
 282 Biographical Studies 
 
 have been, if completed, a book of the utmost 
 value. But one or two trifling illustrations 
 of this habit of living in an atmosphere in 
 which the past was no less real to him than 
 the present may be forgiven. When careless 
 friends directed letters to him at " Somerleaze, 
 Wookey, Somerset," Wookey being a village a 
 quarter of a mile from his house, but on the other 
 side of the river Axe, he would write back com- 
 plaining that they were "confusing the England 
 and Wales of the seventh century." When his 
 attention had been called to a discussion in the 
 weekly journals about Shelley's first wife he wrote 
 to me, "Why will they worry us with this 
 Harrietfrage ? You and I have quite enough 
 to do with Helen, and Theodora, and Mary 
 Stuart." So in addressing Somersetshire rustics 
 during his election campaign in 1868, he could 
 not help on one occasion referring to Ptolemy 
 Euergetes, and on another launching out into an 
 eloquent description of the Landesgemeinde of 
 Uri. 
 
 Industry came naturally to Freeman, because 
 he was fond of his own studies and did not 
 think of his work as task work. The joy in 
 reading and writing about bygone times sprang 
 from the intensity with which he realised them. 
 He had no geographical imagination, finding 
 no more pleasure in books of travel than in 
 dramatic poetry. But he loved to dwell in the
 
 Edward Freeman 283 
 
 past, and seemed to see and feel and make him- 
 self a part of the events he described. Next 
 to their worth as statements of carefully investi- 
 gated facts, the chief merit of his books lies in 
 the sense of reality which fills them. The politics 
 of Corinth or Sicyon, the contest of William the 
 Red with St. Anselm, interested him as keenly 
 as a general election in which he was himself 
 a candidate. Looking upon current events with 
 an historian's eye, he was fond, on the other 
 hand, of illustrating features of Roman history 
 from incidents he had witnessed when taking part 
 in local government as a magistrate ; and in 
 describing the relations of Hermocrates and 
 Athenagoras at Syracuse he drew upon observa- 
 tions which he had made in watching the dis- 
 cussions of the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford. 
 This power of realising the politics of ancient 
 or mediaeval times was especially useful to him 
 as a writer, because without it his minuteness 
 might have verged on prolixity, seeing that he 
 cared exclusively for the political part of history. 
 It was one of the points in which he rose superior 
 to most of those German students with whom it 
 is natural to compare him. Many of them have 
 equalled him in industry and diligence ; some have 
 surpassed him in the ingenuity which they bring 
 to bear upon obscure problems ; but few of them 
 have shown the same gift for understanding 
 what the political life of remote times really was.
 
 284 Biographical Studies 
 
 Like Gibbon, Freeman was not a mere student, 
 but also a man with opportunities of mixing in 
 affairs, accustomed to bear his share in the world's 
 work, and so better able than the mere student 
 can be to comprehend how that work goes forward. 
 Though he was too peculiar in his views and his 
 way of stating them to have been adapted either 
 to the House of Commons or to a local assembly, 
 and would indeed have been wasted upon nine- 
 teen-twentieths of the business there transacted, 
 he loved politics and watched them with a 
 shrewdly observant eye. Though he indulged 
 his foibles in some directions, he could turn upon 
 history a stream of clear common sense which 
 sometimes made short work of German conjec- 
 tures. And he was free from the craving to 
 have at all hazards something new to advance, 
 be it a trivial fact or an unsupported guess. He 
 was accustomed of late years to complain that 
 German scholarship seemed to be suffering from 
 the passion for etwas Neues, and the consequent 
 disposition to disparage work which did not 
 abound with novelties, however empty or tran- 
 sient such novelties might be. 
 
 To think of the Germans is to think of 
 industry. Freeman was a true Teuton in the 
 mass of his production. Besides the seven thick 
 volumes devoted to the Norman Conquest and 
 William Rufus, the four thick volumes to Sicily, 
 four large volumes of collected essays, and nine or
 
 Edward Freeman 285 
 
 ten smaller volumes on architectural subjects, on 
 the English constitution, on the United States, 
 on the Slavs and the Turks, he wrote an even 
 greater quantity of matter which appeared in the 
 Saturday Review during the twenty years from 
 1856 to 1876, and it was by these articles, not 
 less than by his books, that he succeeded in 
 dispelling many current errors and confusions, 
 and in establishing some of his own doctrines 
 so firmly that we now scarcely remember what 
 iteration and reiteration, in season and out of 
 season, and much to the impatience of those 
 who remembered that they had heard these 
 doctrines often before, were needed to make them 
 accepted by the public. Freeman's swift facility 
 was due to his power of concentration. He 
 always knew what he meant an article to contain 
 before he sat down to his desk ; and in his 
 historical researches he made each step so certain 
 that he seldom required to reinvestigate a point 
 or to change, in revising for the press, the sub- 
 stance of what he had written. 
 
 In his literary habits he was so methodical 
 and precise that he could carry on three under- 
 takings at the same time, keeping on different 
 tables in his working rooms the books he needed 
 for each, and passing at stated hours from one 
 to the other. It is often remarked that the 
 growth of journalism, forcing men to write 
 hastily and profusely, tends to injure literature
 
 2 86 Biographical Studies 
 
 both in matter and in manner. In point of 
 matter, Freeman, though for the best part of 
 his Hfe a very prolific journalist, did not seem 
 to suffer. He was as exact, clear, and thorough 
 at the end as he had been at the beginning. 
 On his style, however, the results were un- 
 fortunate. It retained its force and its point, 
 but it became diffuse, not that each particular 
 sentence was weak, or vague, or wordy, but that 
 what was substantially the same idea was 
 apt to be reiterated, with slight differences of 
 phrase, in several successive sentences or para- 
 graphs. He was fond of the Psalter, great part 
 of which he knew by heart, and we told him 
 that he had caught too much of the manner of 
 Psalm cxix. This tendency to repetition caused 
 some of his books, and particularly the Normaii 
 Conquest and Willia7}i Rufus, to swell to a por- 
 tentous bulk. Those treatises, which constitute 
 a history of England from a.u. 1042 to iioo, 
 would be more widely read if they had been, 
 as they ought to have been, reduced to three or 
 four volumes ; and as he came to perceive this, 
 he resolved in the last year of his life to 
 republish the Norman Conquest in a condensed 
 form. To be obliged to compress was a whole- 
 some, though unwelcome, discipline, and the 
 result is seen in some of his smaller books, such 
 as the historical essays, and the sketches of 
 English towns, often wonderfully fresh and
 
 Edward Freeman 287 
 
 vigorous bits of work. Anxiety to be scrupu- 
 lously accurate runs into prolixity, and Freeman 
 so loved his subjects that it pained him 
 to omit any characteristic detail a chronicler 
 had preserved ; as he once observed to a dis- 
 tinguished writer who was dealing with a much 
 later period, " You know so much about your 
 people that you have to leave out a great deal, 
 I know so little that I must tell all I know." 
 The tendency to repeat the same word too fre- 
 quently sprang from his preference for words of 
 Teutonic origin and his pride in what he 
 deemed the purity of his English. His pages 
 would have been livelier had he felt free to 
 indulge in the humour with which his private 
 letters sparkled ; for he was full of fun, though it 
 often turned on points too recondite for the public. 
 But it was only in the notes to his histories, and 
 seldom even there, that he gave play to one of 
 the merits that most commended him to his 
 friends. 
 
 So far of his books. He was, however, also 
 Regius Professor of History at Oxford during 
 the last eight years of his life, and thus the head 
 of the historical faculty in his own university 
 which he dearly loved. That he was less 
 effective as a teacher than as a writer may be 
 partly ascribed to his having come too late to 
 a new kind of work, and one which demands 
 the freshness of youth ; partly also to the
 
 2 88 Biographical Studies 
 
 cramping conditions under which professors 
 have to teach at Oxford, where everything is 
 governed by a system of examinations which 
 Freeman was never tired of denouncing as 
 ruinous to study. His friends, however, doubted 
 whether the natural bent of his mind was 
 towards oral teaching. It was a peculiar 
 mind, which ran in a deep channel of its 
 own, and could not easily, if the metaphor 
 be permissible, be drawn off to irrigate the 
 adjoining fields. He was always better at 
 putting his own views in a clear and telling 
 way than at laying his intellect alongside of 
 yours, apprehending your point of view, and 
 setting himself to meet it. Or, to put the same 
 thing differently, you learned more by listening 
 to him than by conversing with him. He 
 had not the quick intellectual sympathy and 
 effusion which feels its way to the heart of an 
 audience, and indeed derives inspiration from the 
 sight of an audience. In his election meetings 
 I noticed that the temper and sentiment of the 
 listeners did not in the least affect him ; what 
 he said was what he himself cared to say, not 
 what he felt they would wish to hear. So 
 also in his lecturing he pleased himself, and 
 chose the topics he liked best rather than those 
 which the examination scheme prescribed to the 
 students. Perhaps he was right, for he was of those 
 whose excellence in performance depends upon
 
 Edward Freeman 289 
 
 the enjoyment they find in the exercise of their 
 powers. But even on the topics he selected, he 
 did not take hold of and guide the mind of the 
 students, realising their particular difficulties and 
 needs, but simply delivered his own message in 
 his own way. Admitting this deficiency, the fact 
 remains that he was not only an ornament to the 
 University by the example he set of unflagging 
 zeal, conscientious industry, loyalty to truth, and 
 love of freedom, but also a stimulating influence 
 upon those who were occupied with history. 
 He delighted to surround himself with the most 
 studious of the younger workers, gave them 
 abundant encouragement and recognition, and 
 never grudged the time to help them by his 
 knowledge or his counsel. 
 
 Much the same might be said of his lifelong 
 friend and illustrious predecessor in the chair of 
 history (Dr. Stubbs), whom Freeman had been 
 generously extolling for many years before the 
 merits of that admirable scholar became known to 
 the public. Stubbs disliked lecturing; and though 
 once a year he delivered a "public lecture" full of 
 wisdom, and sometimes full of wit also, he was not 
 effective as a teacher, not so effective, for instance, 
 as Bishop Creighton, who won his reputation 
 at Merton College long before he became Pro- 
 fessor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge. 
 But Stubbs, by his mere presence in the Uni- 
 versity, and by the inexhaustible kindness with 
 
 u
 
 290 Biographical Studies 
 
 which he answered questions and gave advice, 
 rendered great services to the studies of the place. 
 It may be doubted whether, when he was raised 
 to the episcopal bench, history did not lose more 
 than the Church of England gained. Other men 
 of far less ability could have discharged five-sixths 
 of a bishop's duties equally well, but there was no 
 one else in England, if indeed in Europe, capable 
 of carrying on his historical researches. So 
 Dr. Lightfoot was, as Professor at Cambridge, 
 doing work for Christian learning even more 
 precious than the work which is still affectionately 
 remembered in his diocese of Durham. 
 
 Few men have had a genius for friendship 
 equal to Freeman's. The names of those he 
 cared for were continually on his lips, and their 
 lives in his thoughts ; their misfortunes touched 
 him like his own ; he was always ready to 
 defend them, always ready to give any aid they 
 needed. No differences of opinion affected his 
 regard. Sensitive as he was to criticism, he 
 received their censure on any part of his work 
 without offence. The need he felt for knowing 
 how they fared and for sharing his thoughts with 
 them expressed itself in the enormous correspond- 
 ence, not of business, but of pure affection, which 
 he kept up with his many friends, and which 
 forms, for his letters were so racy that many of 
 them were preserved, the fullest record of his 
 life.
 
 Edward Freeman 291 
 
 This warmth of feeling deserves to be dwelt 
 on, because it explains the tendency to vehem- 
 ence in controversy which brought some enmities 
 upon him. There was an odd contrast between 
 his fondness for describing wars and battles and 
 that extreme aversion to militarism which made 
 him appear to dislike the very existence of a 
 British army and navy. So his combativeness, 
 and the zest with which he bestowed shrewd 
 blows on those who encountered him, though 
 due to his wholesome scorn for pretenders, and 
 his hatred of falsehood and injustice, seemed 
 inconsistent with the real kindliness of his nature. 
 The kindliness, however, no one who knew him 
 could doubt ; it showed itself not only in his 
 care for dumb creatures and for children, but in 
 the depth and tenderness of his affections. Of 
 religion he spoke little, and only to his most 
 intimate friends. In opinion he had drifted a 
 long way from the Anglo- Catholic position of 
 his early manhood ; but he remained a sincerely 
 pious Christian. 
 
 Though his health had been infirm for some 
 years before his death, his literary activity did 
 not slacken, nor did his powers show signs of 
 decline. There is nothing in his writings, nor 
 in any writings of our time, more broad, clear, 
 and forcible than many chapters of the History 
 of Sicily. Much of his work has effected its 
 purpose, and will, by degrees, lose its place in
 
 292 Biographical Studies 
 
 the public eye. But much will live on into a 
 yet distant future, because it has been done so 
 thoroughly, and contains so much sound and 
 vigorous thinking, that coming generations of 
 historical students will need it and value it almost 
 as our own has done.
 
 ROBERT LOWE 
 VISCOUNT SHERBROOKE^ 
 
 Had Robert Lowe died in 1868, when he became 
 a Cabinet Minister, his death would have been a 
 poHtical event of the first magnitude ; but when 
 he died in 1892 (in his eighty-second year) hardly 
 anybody under forty years of age knew who Lord 
 Sherbrooke was, and the new generation wondered 
 why their seniors should feel any interest in the 
 disappearance of a superannuated peer whose 
 name had long since ceased to be heard in either 
 the literary or the political world. It requires 
 an effort to believe that he was at one time held 
 the equal in oratory and the superior in intellect 
 of Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone. There are few- 
 instances in our annals of men who have been 
 equally famous and whose fame has been bounded 
 by so short a span out of a long life. 
 
 No one who knew Lowe ever doubted his 
 abilities. He made a brilliant reputation, first at 
 Winchester (where, as his autobiography tells us, 
 
 ' A carefully written life of Lord Shcrl>ro()i<e fin two volumes) by Mr. 
 Patchett Martin was jaiblished in 1896. The most interesting part of 
 it is the short fragment of autobiograpliy with which it begins, and which 
 carries the story down to Lowe's arrival in Australia. 
 
 = 93
 
 294 Biographical Studies 
 
 he was miserable) and then at Oxford, where he was 
 the contemporary and fully the peer of Roundell 
 Palmer (afterwards Lord Chancellor Selborne) 
 and of Archibald Tait (afterwards Archbishop of 
 Canterbury). He was much sought after and 
 wonderfully effective as a private tutor or "coach" 
 in classical subjects, being not only an excellent 
 scholar but extremely clear and stimulating as a 
 teacher. He retained his love of literature all 
 through life, and made himself, inter alia per- 
 multa, a good Icelandic scholar and a fair Sanskrit 
 scholar. For mathematics he had no turn at all. 
 Active sports, he tells us, he enjoyed, character- 
 istically adding, "they open to dulness also its road 
 to fame." When he left the University, where 
 anecdotes of his caustic wit were long current, he 
 tried his fortune at the Bar, but with such scant 
 success that he presently emigrated to New 
 South Wales, soon rose to prominence and un- 
 popularity there, returned in ten years with a 
 tolerable fortune and a detestation of democracy, 
 became a leading -article writer on the Times, 
 entered Parliament, but was little heard of till 
 Lord Palmerston gave him (in 1859) the place of 
 Vice-President of the Committee of Council on 
 Education. His function in that office was to 
 administer the grants made from the national 
 treasury to elementary schools, and as he found 
 the methods of inspection rather lax, and noted a 
 tendency to superficiality and a neglect of back-
 
 Robert Lowe 295 
 
 ward children, he introduced new rules for the 
 distribution of the grant (the so-called " Revised 
 Code ") which provoked violent opposition. The 
 motive was good, but the rules were too mechani- 
 cal and rigid and often worked harshly ; so he 
 was presently driven from office by an attack led 
 by Lord Robert Cecil {afterwards Lord Salisbury). 
 Though Lowe became known by this struggle, 
 his conspicuous fame dates from 1865, when he 
 appeared as the trenchant critic of a measure for 
 extending the parliamentary franchise in boroughs, 
 introduced by a private member. Next year 
 his powers shone forth in their full lustre. The 
 Liberal Ministry of Lord Russell, led in the 
 House of Commons by Mr. Gladstone, had 
 brought in a Franchise Extension Bill (apply- 
 ing to boroughs only) which excited the dislike 
 of the more conservative or more timid among 
 their supporters. This dislike might not have gone 
 beyond many mutterings and a few desertions 
 but for the vehemence with which Lowe opposed 
 the measure. He fouo-ht aofainst it in a series of 
 speeches which produced a greater impression in 
 the House of Commons, and roused stronger 
 feelings of admiration and hostility in the 
 country, than any political addresses had done 
 since 1832. The new luminary rose so sud- 
 denly to the zenith, and cast so unexpected a 
 light that everybody was dazzled ; and though 
 many dissented, and some attacked him bitterly,
 
 296 Biographical Studies 
 
 few ventured to meet him in argument on the 
 ground he had selected. The effect of these 
 speeches of 1866 can hardly be understood by 
 any one who reads them to-day unless he knows 
 how commonplace and "practical," that is to 
 say, averse to general reasonings and historical 
 illustrations, the character of parliamentary de- 
 bating was becoming even in Lowe's time. It 
 is still more practical and still less ornate in our 
 own day. 
 
 The House of Commons then contained, 
 and has indeed usually contained (though some 
 Houses are much better than others), many cap- 
 able lawyers, capable men of business, capable 
 country gentlemen ; many men able to express 
 themselves with clearness, fluency, and that sort 
 of temperate good sense which Englishmen 
 especially value. Few, however, were able to 
 produce finished rhetoric ; still fewer had a range 
 of thought and knowledge extending much be- 
 yond the ordinary education of a gentleman and 
 the ordinary ideas of a politician; and the assembly 
 was one so intolerant of rhetoric, and so much in- 
 clined to treat, as unpractical, facts and arguments 
 drawn from recondite sources, that even those who 
 possessed out-of-the-way learning were disposed, 
 and rightly so, to use it sparingly. In Robert 
 Lowe, however, a remarkable rhetorical and dia- 
 lectical power was combined with a command 
 of branches of historical, literary, and economic
 
 Robert Lowe 297 
 
 knowledge so unfamiliar to the average member 
 as to have for him all the charm of novelty. 
 The rhetoric was sometimes too elaborate. The 
 political philosophy was not always sound. But 
 the rhetoric was so polished that none could fail 
 to enjoy it ; and the political philosophy was put 
 in so terse, bright, and pointed a form that it 
 made the ordinary country gentleman fancy him- 
 self a philosopher while he listened to it in the 
 House or repeated it to his friends at the club. 
 The speeches, which, though directed against 
 a particular measure, constituted an indictment 
 of democratic government in general, had the 
 advantages of expressing what many felt but 
 few had ventured to say, and of being delivered 
 from one side of the House and cheered by 
 the other side. No position gives a debater in 
 the House of Commons such a vantage ground 
 for securing attention. Its rarity makes it re- 
 markable. If the speaker who attacks his own 
 party is supposed to do so from personal motives, 
 the personal element gives piquancy. If he may 
 be credited with conscientious conviction, his 
 shafts strike with added weight, for how strong 
 must conviction be when it turns a man against 
 his former friends. Accordingly, nothing so 
 much annoys a party and gratifies its antag- 
 onists as when one of its own recalcitrant 
 members attacks it in flank. When one looks 
 back now at the contents of these speeches
 
 298 Biographical Studies 
 
 there were only five or six of them and finds 
 one's self surprised at their success, this favour- 
 ing circumstance and the whole temper of the 
 so-called "upper classes" need to be remem- 
 bered. The bulk of the wealthier commercial 
 class and a large section of the landed class had 
 theretofore belonged to the Liberal party. Most 
 of them, however, were then already beginning 
 to pass through what was called Whiggism into 
 habits of thought that were practically Tory. 
 They did not know how far they had gone till 
 Lowe's speeches told them, and they welcomed 
 his ideas as justifying their own tendencies. 
 
 In themselves, as pieces either of rhetoric or 
 of "civil wisdom," the speeches are not first-rate. 
 No one would dream of comparing them to 
 Burke's, in originality, or in richness of diction, 
 or in weight of thought. But for the moment 
 they were far more appreciated than Burke's 
 were by the House of his time, which thought of 
 dining while he thought of convincing. Robert 
 Lowe was for some months the idol of a large 
 part of the educated class, and indeed of that 
 part chiefly which plumed itself upon its culture. 
 I recollect to have been in those days at a 
 breakfast party given by an eminent politician 
 and nominal supporter of the Liberal Ministry, 
 and to have heard Mr. G. S. Venables, the leader 
 of the SatiLrday Review set, an able and copious 
 writer who was a sort of literary and political
 
 Robert Lowe 299 
 
 oracle among his friends, deliver, amid general 
 applause, including that of the host, the opinion 
 that Lowe was an intellectual giant compared to 
 Mr. Gladstone, and that the reputation of the 
 latter had been extinguished for ever. 
 
 This period of glory, which was enhanced by 
 the fall of Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone from 
 power in June 1866 the defeat came on a minor 
 point, but was largely due to Lowe's speeches 
 lasted till Lowe, who had now become a force to 
 be counted with, obtained office as Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer in the Liberal Ministry which 
 Mr. Gladstone formed in the end of 1868. From 
 that moment his position declined. He lost popu- 
 larity and influence both with the country and in 
 the House of Commons. His speeches were 
 always able, but they did not seem to tell when 
 delivered from the ministerial bench. His fin- 
 ancial proposals, though ingenious, were thought 
 too ingenious, and showed a deficient perception 
 of the tendencies of the English mind. No 
 section likes being taxed, but Lowe's budgets 
 met with a more than usually angry opposition. 
 His economies and retrenchments, so far from 
 bringing him the credit he deserved, exposed 
 him to the charge of cheese -paring parsimony, 
 and did much to render the Ministry unpopular. 
 Before that ministry fell in 1874, Lowe, who 
 had in 1873 exchanged the Exchequer for the 
 Home Office, had almost ceased to be a personage
 
 300 Biographical Studies 
 
 in politics. He did nothing to retrieve his fame 
 during the six years of Opposition that followed, 
 seldom spoke, took little part in the denunciation 
 of Lord Beaconsfield's Eastern and Afghan policy, 
 which went on from 1876 till 1880, and once at 
 least gave slight signs of declining mental power. 
 So in 1880 he was relegated to the House of 
 Lords, because the new Liberal Government of 
 that year could not make room for him. Very 
 soon thereafter his memory began to fail, and for 
 the last ten years of his life he had been practi- 
 cally forgotten, though sometimes seen, a pathetic 
 figure, at evening parties. There is hardly a 
 parallel in our parliamentary annals to so complete 
 an eclipse of so brilliant a luminary. 
 
 This rapid obscuration of a reputation which 
 was genuine, for Lowe's powers had been amply 
 proved, was due to no accident, and was apparent 
 long before mental decay set in. The causes lay 
 in himself. One cause was purely physical. He 
 was excessively short-sighted, so much so that 
 when he was writing a letter, his nose was apt to 
 rub out the words his pen had traced ; and this 
 defect shut him out from all that knowledge of 
 individual men and of audiences which is to be 
 obtained by watching their faces. Mr. Gladstone, 
 who never seemed to resent Lowe's attacks, and 
 greatly admired his gifts it was not so clear 
 that Lowe reciprocated the admiration used to 
 relate that on one occasion when a foreign poten-
 
 Robert Lowe 301 
 
 tate met the Minister in St. James's Park and put 
 out his hand in friendly greeting, Lowe repelled 
 his advances, and when the King said, " But, Mr. 
 Lowe, you know me quite well," he answered, 
 " Yes, indeed, I know you far too well, and I don't 
 want to have anything more to do with you." 
 He had mistaken the monarch for a prominent 
 politician with whom he had had a sharp en- 
 counter on a deputation a few days before ! For 
 social purposes Lowe might almost as well have 
 been blind ; yet he did not receive that kind of 
 indulgence which is extended to the blind. In 
 the interesting fragment of autobiography which 
 he left, he attributes his unpopularity entirely to 
 this cause, declaring that he was really of a kindly 
 nature, liking his fellow-men just as well as most 
 of them like one another.^ But in truth his own 
 character had something to answer for. Without 
 being ill-natured, he was deemed a hard-natured 
 man, who did not appear to consider the feelings 
 of others. He had indeed a love of mischief, 
 and gleefully tells in his autobiography how, 
 when travelling in his youth through the Scottish 
 Highlands, he drove the too self-conscious Words- 
 worth wild by his incessant praise of Walter Scott." 
 
 ^ In his autobiography he writes, " With a quiel temiier and a real 
 wish to please, I have been obliged all my life to submit to an amount of 
 unpopularity which I really did not deserve, and to teel myself condemned 
 for what were really physical rather than moral deliciencies." 
 
 - There was an anecdote current in the University of Oxford down to 
 my time that when Lowe was examining in the examination which the 
 statutes call " Responsions," the dons " Little-go," and the undergraduates
 
 302 Biographical Studies 
 
 He had not in political life more than his fair 
 share of personal enmities. One of them was 
 Disraeli's. They were not unequally matched. 
 Lowe was intellectually in some respects stronger, 
 but he wanted Disraeli's skill in managing men 
 and assemblies. Disraeli resented Lowe's sar- 
 casms, and on one occasion, when the latter had 
 made an indiscreet speech, went out of his way 
 to inflict on him a personal humiliation. 
 
 Nor was this Lowe's only defect. Powerful 
 in attack, he was feeble in defence. Terrible as 
 a critic, he had, as his official career showed, little 
 constructive talent, little tact in shaping or recom- 
 mending his measures. Unsteady or inconstant 
 in purpose, he was at one moment headstrong, 
 at another timid or vacillating. These faults, 
 scarcely noticed when he was in Opposition, 
 sensibly reduced his value as a minister and as a 
 Cabinet colleague. 
 
 In private Lowe was good company, bright, 
 alert, and not unkindly. He certainly did not, 
 as was alleged of another famous contemporary, 
 
 " Smalls," a friend coming in while the viva voce was in progress, asked 
 him how he was getting on. "Excellently,"' said Lowe; "five men 
 plucked already, and the sixth very shaky." Another tale, not likely to 
 have been invented, relates that when he and several members of the 
 then Liberal Ministry were staying in Dublin with the Lord Lieutenant, 
 and had taken an excursion into the Wicklow hills, they found themselves 
 one afternoon obliged to wait for half an hour at a railway station. To 
 pass the time, Lowe forthwith engaged in a dispute about the charge with 
 .the car-drivers who had brought them, a dispute which soon became hot 
 and noisy, to the delight of Lowe, but to the horror of the old Lord 
 Chancellor, who was one of the party.
 
 Robert Lowe 303 
 
 Lord Westbury, positively enjoy the giving of 
 pain. But he had a most unchristian scorn for the 
 slow and the dull and the unenlightened, and never 
 restrained his scorching wit merely for the sake of 
 sparing those who came in his way. If the dis- 
 tinction be permissible, he was not cruel but he 
 was merciless, that is to say, unrestrained by com- 
 passion. Instances are not wanting of men who 
 have maintained great influence in spite of their 
 rough tongues and the enmities which rough 
 tongues provoke. But such men have usually 
 also possessed some of the arts of popularity, and 
 have been able to retain the adherence of their 
 party at large, even when they had alienated 
 many who came into personal contact with them. 
 This was not Lowe's case. He did not conceal 
 his contempt for the multitude, and had not the 
 tact needed for humouring it, any more than for 
 managing the House of Commons. The very 
 force and keenness of his intellect kept him aloof 
 from other people and prevented him from under- 
 standing their sentiments. He saw things so 
 clearly that he could not tolerate mental con- 
 fusion, and was apt to reach conclusions so fast 
 that he missed perceiving some of the things 
 which are gradually borne in upon slower minds. 
 There are also instances of stroncj men who, 
 though they do not revile their opponents, incur 
 hatred because their strength and activity make 
 them feared. Hostilitv concentrates itself on the
 
 304 Biographical Studies 
 
 opponents deemed most formidable, and a political 
 leader who is spared while his fellows are attacked 
 cannot safely assume that this immunity is a 
 tribute to his virtues. Incessant abuse fell to 
 the lot of Mr. Bright, who was not often, and of 
 Mr. Gladstone, who was hardly ever, personally 
 bitter in invective. But in compensation Mr. 
 Bright and Mr. Gladstone received enthusiastic 
 loyalty from their followers. For Lowe there was 
 no such compensation. Even his own side did 
 not love him. There was also a certain harshness, 
 perhaps a certain narrowness, about his views. 
 Even in those days of rigid economics, he took 
 an exceptionally rigid view of all economic prob- 
 lems, refusing to make allowance for any motives 
 except those of bare self-interest. Though he 
 did not belong by education or by social 
 ties to the Utilitarian group, and gave an un- 
 gracious reception to J. S. Mill's first speeches 
 in the House of Commons, he was a far more 
 stringent and consistent exponent of the harder 
 kind of Benthamism than was Mill himself. He 
 professed, and doubtless to some extent felt, a 
 contempt for appeals to historical or literary 
 sentiment, and relished nothing more than derid- 
 ing his own classical training as belonging- to an 
 effete and absurd scheme of education. He left 
 his mark on our elementary school system by 
 establishing the system of payment by results, 
 but nearly every change made in that system
 
 Robert Lowe 305 
 
 since his day has tended to destroy the alterations 
 he made and to bring back the older condition 
 of things, though no doubt in an amended form. 
 His ideas of University reform were crude and 
 barren, limited, indeed, to the substitution of what 
 the Germans call " bread studies " for mental culti- 
 vation, and to the extension of the plan of com- 
 petitive examinations for honours and money 
 prizes, a plan which more and more displeases 
 the most enlightened University teachers, and 
 is felt to have done more harm than good to 
 Oxford and Cambridge, where it has had the 
 fullest play. He had also, and could give good 
 reasons for his opinion, a hearty dislike to en- 
 dowments of all kinds ; and once, when asked 
 by a Royal Commission to suggest a mode of 
 improving their application, answered in his 
 trenchant way, "Get rid of them. Throw them 
 into the sea." 
 
 It would not be fair to blame Lowe for the 
 results which followed his vigorous action against 
 the extension of the suffrage in 1866, for no one 
 could then have predicted that in the following 
 year the Tories, beguiled by Mr. Disraeli, would 
 reverse their former attitude and carry a suffrage 
 bill far wider than that which they had rejected a 
 year before. But the sequel of the successful 
 resistance of 1866 may stand as a warning to 
 those who think that the course of thoroughgoing 
 opposition to a measure they dislike is, because
 
 3o6 Biographical Studies 
 
 it seems courageous, likely to be the right and 
 wise course for patriotic men. Had the moderate 
 bill of 1866 been suffered to pass, the question of 
 further extending the suffrage might possibly have 
 slept for another thirty years, for there was no 
 very general or urgent cry for it among the work- 
 ing people, and England would have continued 
 to be ruled in the main by voters belonging to 
 the middle class and the upper section of the 
 working class. The consequence of the heated 
 contest of 1866 was not only to bring about 
 a larger immediate change in 1867, but to 
 create an interest in the question which soon 
 prompted the demand for the extension of house- 
 hold suffrage to the counties, and completed in 
 1884-85 the process by which England has be- 
 come virtually a democracy, though a plutocratic 
 democracy, still affected by the habits and notions 
 of oligarchic days. Thus Robert Lowe, as much 
 as Disraeli and Gladstone, may in a sense be 
 called an author of the tremendous change which 
 has passed upon the British Constitution since 
 1866, and the extent of which was not for a 
 long while realised. Lowe himself never re- 
 canted his views, but never repeated his declara- 
 tion of them, feeling that he had incurred 
 unpopularity enough, and probably feeling also 
 that the case was hopeless. 
 
 People who disliked his lugubrious forecasts 
 used to call him a Cassandra, perhaps forgetting
 
 Robert Lowe 307 
 
 that, besides the distinctive feature of Cassandra's 
 prophecies that nobody beHeved them, there was 
 another distinctive feature, viz, that they came 
 true. Did Lowe's? It is often profitable and 
 sometimes amusing to turn back to the predic- 
 tions through which eminent men reheved their 
 perturbed souls, and see how far these superior 
 minds were able to discern the tendencies, already 
 at work in their time, which were beginning to 
 o-ain streno-th, and were destined to determine 
 the future. Whoever reads Lowe's speeches of 
 1865-67 may do worse than glance at the same 
 time at a book,^ long since forgotten, which con- 
 tains the efforts of a group of young University 
 Liberals to refute the arguments used by him 
 and by Lord Cairns, the strongest of his allies, 
 in their opposition to schemes of parliamentary 
 reform. 
 
 To compare the optimism of these young 
 writers and Lowe's pessimism with what has 
 actually come to pass is a not uninstructive 
 task. True it is that England has had only 
 thirty-five years' experience of the Reform Act 
 of 1867, and only seventeen years' experience 
 of that even greater step towards pure demo- 
 cracy which was effected by the Franchise and 
 Redistribution Acts of 18S4-85. We are still 
 far from knowing what sorts of Parliaments and 
 policies the enlarged suffrage will end by giving. 
 
 ' Essays on Reforrit, publislied in 1S67.
 
 3o8 Biographical Studies 
 
 But some at least of the mischiefs Lowe foretold 
 have not arrived. He expected first of all a 
 rapid increase in corruption and intimidation at 
 parliamentary elections. The quality of the 
 House of Commons would decline, because money 
 would rule, and small boroughs would no longer 
 open the path by which talent could enter. 
 Members would be either millionaires or dema- 
 gogues, and they would also become far more 
 subservient to their constituents. Universal 
 suffrage would soon arrive, because no halting- 
 place between the ^lo franchise^ and universal 
 suffrage could be found. Placed on a democratic 
 basis, the House of Commons would not be able 
 to retain its authority over the Executive. The 
 House of Lords, the Established Church, the 
 judicial bench (in that dignity and that independ- 
 ence which are essential to its usefulness), would 
 be overthrown as England passed into "the bare 
 and level plain of democracy where every ant-hill 
 is a mountain and every thistle a forest tree." 
 These and the other features characteristic of 
 popular government on w^hich Lowe savagely 
 descanted were pieced together out of Plato and 
 Tocqueville, coupled with his own disagreeable 
 experiences of Australian politics. None of the 
 predicted evils can be said to have as yet be- 
 come features of the polity and government of 
 
 ^ The then borough qualification, which jNIr. Gladstone's Bill proposed 
 to reduce to ^T-
 
 Robert Lowe 309 
 
 England,^ though the power of the House rela- 
 tively to the Cabinet does seem to be declining. 
 Yet some of Lowe's incidental remarks are true, 
 and not least true is his prediction that democracies 
 will be found just as prone to war, just as apt to 
 be swept away by passion, as other kinds of 
 government have been. Few signs herald the 
 approach of that millennium of peace and en- 
 lightenment which Cobden foretold and for which 
 Gladstone did not cease to hope. 
 
 No one since Lowe has taken up the part of 
 advocattts diaboli against democracy which he 
 played in 1866.^ Since Disraeli passed the House- 
 hold Suffrage in Boroughs Bill in 1867, a nulli- 
 fication of Lowe's triumph which incensed him 
 more than ever against Disraeli, no one has ever 
 come forward in England as the avowed enemy 
 of changes designed to popularise our govern- 
 ment. Parties have quarrelled over the time and 
 the manner of extensions of the franchise, but the 
 
 1 Mr. Gladstone said to me in 1S97 that the extension of the sufl'raye 
 had, in his judgment, improved the quality of legishition, making it more 
 regardful of the interests of the body of the people, but had not improved 
 the quality of the House of Commons. 
 
 - Sir H. S. Maine's Quarterly Review articles, published in a volume 
 under the title of Popular Government, come nearest to being a literary 
 presentation of the case against democracy, but they are, with all their 
 ingenuity and grace of style, so provokingly vague and loosely expressed 
 that there can seldom be found in them a proposition with which one can 
 agree, or from which one can differ. E. de Laveleye's well-known book 
 is not much more substantial, but instruction may (as respects France) 
 be found in the late Edmond Scherer's De la Dtimocratie, and (as respects 
 England and the United .States) in M. Ostrogorski's recent book, Democracy 
 and the Organisation of Political Parties.
 
 3IO Biographical Studies 
 
 issue of principle raised in 1866 has not been 
 raised again. Even in 1884, when Mr. Gladstone 
 carried his bill for assimilating the county franchise 
 to that existing in boroughs, the Tory party did 
 not oppose the measure in principle, but confined 
 themselves to insisting that it should be accom- 
 panied by a scheme for the redistribution of seats. 
 The secret, first unveiled by Disraeli, that the 
 masses will as readily vote for the Tory party as 
 for the Liberal, is now common property, and 
 universal suffrage, when it comes to be offered, is 
 as likely to be offered by the former party as by 
 the latter. This ogives a touch of historical in- 
 terest to Lowe's speeches of 1866. They are the 
 swan -song of the old constitutionalism. The 
 changes which came in 1867 and 1884 must have 
 come sooner or later, for they were in the natural 
 line of development as we see it all over the 
 world ; but they might have come much later 
 had not Lowe's opposition wrecked the moderate 
 scheme of 1866. Apart from that episode Lowe's 
 career would now be scarcely remembered, or 
 would be remembered by those who knew his 
 splendid gifts as an illustration of the maxim that 
 mere intellectual power does not stand first among 
 the elements of character that go to the winning 
 of a foremost place.
 
 WILLIAM ROBERTSOiN SMITH 
 
 Robertson Smith/ the most widely learned and 
 one of the most powerful teachers that either 
 Cambridge or Oxford could show during the 
 years of his residence in England, died at the 
 age of forty-seven on the 31st of March 1894. 
 To the English public generally his name was 
 little known, or was remembered only in connec- 
 tion with the theological controversy and ecclesi- 
 astical trial of which he had been the central figure 
 in Scotland fifteen years before. But on the 
 Continent of Europe and by Orientalists generally 
 he was regarded as the foremost Semitic scholar 
 of Britain, and by those who knew him as one of 
 the most remarkable men of his time. 
 
 He was born in 1846 in the quiet pastoral 
 valley of the Don, in Aberdeenshire. His father, 
 
 1 No life of Robertson Smith has yet been written, but it is hoped that 
 one may be prepared l^y his intimate friend, Mr. J. Sutherland Black. A 
 portrait of him (by his friend Sir George Reitl, late President of the Royal 
 Scottish Academy) hangs in the combination-rdoin of Christ's College, 
 Cambridge, to tlie library of which Smith's collection of Oriental books 
 was presented by his friends, and another has been placed in the Divinity 
 College of the United Free Presbyterian Church at Aberdeen. A memorial 
 windcjw has been set up in the chapel of the University of Aberdeen, where 
 he won his first distinctions. I have to thank my friend Mr. Black for 
 some suggestions he has kindly made after perusing this sketch. 
 
 ^11
 
 312 Biographical Studies 
 
 who was a minister of the Scottish Free Church 
 in the parish of Keig, possessed high mathematical 
 talent, and his mother, who survived him six years, 
 was a woman of great force of character, who 
 retained till her death, at seventy -six years of 
 age, the full exercise of her keen intelligence. 
 Smith went straight from his father's teaching to 
 the University of Aberdeen, and after graduating 
 there, continued his studies first at Bonn in 1865, 
 and afterwards at Gottingen (1869). When only 
 twenty-four he became Professor of Oriental 
 Languages in the College or Divinity School of 
 the Free Church at Aberdeen, and two years 
 later was chosen one of the revisers of the Old 
 Testament, a striking honour for so young a 
 man. In 1881 he became first assistant-editor 
 and then editor-in-chief of the ninth edition of the 
 Encyclopcedia Britannica. He was exceptionally 
 qualified for the post by the variety of his attain- 
 ments and by the extreme quickness of his mind, 
 which rapidly acquired knowledge on almost any 
 kind of subject. Those who knew him are agreed 
 that among all the eminent men who have been 
 connected with this great Encyclopcedia from its 
 first beginning nearly a century and a half ago until 
 now, he was surpassed by none, if equalled by any, 
 in the range of his learning and in the capacity to 
 bring learning to bear upon editorial work. He 
 took infinite pains to find the most competent 
 writers, and was able to exercise effective per-
 
 William Robertson Smith 313 
 
 sonal supervision over a very large proportion of 
 the articles. The ninth edition was much fuller 
 and more thorough than any of its predecessors ; 
 and good as the first twelve volumes were, a still 
 higher level of excellence was attained in the latter 
 half, a result due to his industry and discernment. 
 Not a few of the articles on subjects connected 
 with the Old Testament were from his own pen ; 
 and they were among the best in the work. 
 
 The appearance of one of them, that entitled 
 " Bible," which contained a general view of the 
 history of the canonical books of Scripture, their 
 dates, authorship, and reception by the Christian 
 Church, became a turning-point in his life. The 
 propositions he stated regarding the origin of 
 parts of the Old Testament, particularly the 
 Pentateuch, excited alarm and displeasure in 
 Scotland, where few persons had become aware 
 of the conclusions reached by recent Biblical 
 scholars in Continental Europe. The article 
 was able, clear, and fearless, plainly the work 
 of a master hand. The views it advanced were 
 not for the most part due to Smith's own in- 
 vestigations, but were to be found in the writings 
 of other learned men. Neither would they now 
 be thought extreme ; they are in fact accepted to- 
 day by many writers of unquestioned orthodoxy 
 in Britain and a (perhaps smaller) number in the 
 United States. In 1876, however, these views 
 were new and startling to those who had not
 
 314 Biographical Studies 
 
 studied in Germany or followed the researches of 
 such men as Ewald, Kuenen, and Wellhausen. 
 The Scottish Free Church had theretofore prided 
 itself upon the rigidity of its orthodoxy; and while 
 among the younger ministers there were a good 
 many able and learned scholars holding what used 
 to be called "advanced views," the mass of the 
 elder and middle-aged clergy had gone on in the 
 old-fashioned traditions of verbal inspiration, and 
 took every word in the Five Books (except the 
 last chapter of Deuteronomy) to have been written 
 down by Moses. It was only natural that their 
 anger should be kindled against the young pro- 
 fessor, whose theories seemed to cut away the 
 ground from under their feet. Proceedings were 
 (1876) taken against him before the Presbytery 
 of Aberdeen, and the case found its way thence 
 to the Synod of Aberdeen, and ultimately to the 
 General Assembly of the Free Church. In one 
 form or another (for the flame was lit anew by 
 other articles published by him in the Encyclo- 
 pcedia) it lingered on for five years. So far from 
 yielding to the storm, Robertson Smith defied it, 
 maintaining not only the truth of his views, but 
 their compatibility with the Presbyterian standards 
 as contained in the Confession of Faith and the 
 Longer and Shorter Catechisms. In this latter 
 contention he was successful, proving that the 
 divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
 had not committed themselves to any specific
 
 William Robertson Smith 315 
 
 doctrine of inspiration, still less to any dogmatic 
 deliverance as to the authorship of particular 
 books of Scripture. The standards simply de- 
 clared that the Word of God was contained in the 
 canonical books, and as there had been little or 
 no controversy between Protestants and Roman 
 Catholics regarding the date or the authorship or 
 the divine authority of those books (apart of 
 course from disputes regarding the Apocrypha), 
 had not dealt specifically with those last men- 
 tioned matters. As it was by reference to the 
 Confession of Faith that the offence alleged had 
 to be established, Smith made good his defence ; 
 so in the end, finding it impossible to convict him 
 of deviation from the standards, and thereby to 
 deal with him as an ordained minister of the 
 Church, his adversaries fell back on the plan 
 of depriving him, by an executive rather than 
 judicial vote, not indeed of his clerical status, 
 but of his professorship, on the ground of the 
 alleged " unsettling character "' of his teaching. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, there had been an im- 
 mense rally to him of the younger clergy and 
 of the less conservative among the laity. The 
 main current of Scottish popular thought and 
 life had ever since the Reformation flowed in 
 an ecclesiastical channel ; and even nowadays, 
 when Scotland is rapidly becoming Anglicised, 
 a theological or ecclesiastical question excites a 
 wider and keener interest there than a similar
 
 3 1 6 Biographical Studies 
 
 question would do in England. So in Scotland 
 for four years " the Robertson Smith case " was 
 the chief topic of discussion outside as well as 
 inside the Free Church. The sympathy felt for 
 the accused was heightened by the ingenuity, 
 energy, and courage with which he defended his 
 position, showing a power of argument and 
 repartee which made it plain that he would 
 have held a distinguished place in any assembly 
 whatever. If his debating had a fault, it was 
 that of being almost too dialectically cogent, so 
 that his antagonists felt that they were being 
 foiled on the form of the argument before they 
 could get to the issues they sought to raise. 
 But while he was an accomplished lawyer in 
 matters of form, he was no less an accomplished 
 theologian in matters of substance. Although the 
 party of repression triumphed so far as to deprive 
 him of his chair, the victory virtually remained 
 with him, not only because he had shown that the 
 Scottish Presbyterian standards did not condemn 
 the views he held, but also because his defence 
 and the discussions which it occasioned had, in 
 bringing those views to the knowledge of a great 
 number of thoughtful laymen, led such persons 
 to reconsider their own position. Some of them 
 found themselves forced to agree with Smith. 
 Others, who distrusted their capacity for arriving 
 at a conclusion, came at least to think that the 
 questions involved did not affect the essentials of
 
 William Robertson Smith 317 
 
 faith, and must be settled by the ordinary canons 
 of historical and philological criticism. Thus the 
 trial proved to be a turning-point for the Scottish 
 Churches, much as the Bssays and Reviews case 
 had been for the Church of England eighteen 
 years earlier. Opinions formerly proscribed were 
 thereafter freely expressed. Nearly all the doc- 
 trinal prosecutions subsequently attempted in 
 the Scottish Presbyterian Churches have failed. 
 Much feeling has been excited, but the result 
 has been to secure a greater latitude than was 
 dreamt of forty years ago. At first the rigidly 
 orthodox section of the Free Church, now 
 almost confined to the Highlands, thought of 
 seceding from the main body on the ground 
 that tolerance was passing into indifference or 
 unbelief But the new ideas continued to grow, 
 and the sentiment in favour of letting clergymen 
 as well as lay church members put a lax construc- 
 tion on the doctrinal standards drawn up in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has spread 
 as widely in Scotland as in England, The Pres- 
 byterian Churches in America and the Roman 
 Catholic Church now stand almost alone among 
 the larger Christian bodies in retaining some- 
 thing of the ancient rigidity. Even the Roman 
 Church begins to feel the solvent power ol these 
 researches. It may be conjectured that as the 
 process of adjusting the letter of Scripture to the 
 conclusions of science which Galileo was not
 
 3 1 8 Biographical Studies 
 
 permitted to apply in the field of astronomy has 
 now been generally applied in the fields of geology 
 and biology, so all the churches will presently re- 
 concile themselves to the conclusions of historical 
 and linguistic criticism, now that such criticism 
 has become truly scientific in its methods. 
 
 Having no longer any tie to Scotland, as he 
 had never desired a pastoral charge there, since 
 he felt his vocation to lie in studv and teaching, 
 Smith was hesitating which way to turn, when the 
 offer of the Lord Almoner's Readership in Arabic, 
 which had become vacant in 1883, determined 
 him to settle in Cambridge. He had travelled 
 in Arabia a few years earlier, thereby adding a 
 colloquial familiarity to his grammatical mastery 
 of the language. He was an ardent student of 
 Arabic literature, and indeed devoted more time 
 to it than to Hebrew. Though he had felt 
 deeply the attacks made upon him, and was 
 indignant at the mode of his dismissal, he was 
 not in the least dispirited ; and his self-control 
 was shown by the way in which he resisted the 
 temptation, to which controversialists are prone, 
 of going further than they originally meant and 
 thereby damaging the position of their supporters. 
 Still, he was weary of controversy, and pleased to 
 see before him a prospect of learned quiet and 
 labour, although the salary of the Readership 
 was less than ^100 a year. Fortunately he 
 had come to a place where gifts like his were
 
 William Robertson Smith 319 
 
 appreciated. The Master and Fellows of Christ's 
 College elected him to a fellowship with no 
 duties of tuition attached to it a wise and grace- 
 ful recognition of his merits which did them the 
 more credit because they had very little personal 
 knowledge of him, while he had possessed no 
 prior tie with the University. Christ's is one of 
 the smaller colleges, but has almost always had 
 men of distinction among its fellows, and has main- 
 tained a hicrh standard of teachinaf. In the list of 
 its alumni stand the names of John Milton, Ralph 
 Cudworth, William Paley, and Charles Darwin. 
 Robertson Smith dwelt in it for the rest of his 
 days, entering into the life of hall and common- 
 room with great zest, for he was of an extremely 
 sociable turn, and the College became proud of 
 him. When a vacancy occurred in the office of 
 University Librarian, he was chosen to fill it. 
 His knowledge of and fondness for books fitted 
 him excellently for the place, but the details of 
 administration worried him, and it was a change 
 for the better when (in 1889), on the death 
 of his friend, W^illiam WVight, he became Pro- 
 fessor of Arabic.^ His efforts to build up a 
 
 1 There was an at^ed Jewish scholar who lived at Cambridge in those 
 days, and wb.o, as sometimes happens, disliked other scholars laboiirinL; 
 in the same field. lie was (so it used to be said) one of the few who 
 knew exactly how the word which we write Jehovah or Inhve ought to 
 be j^ronounced, and it was believed that he had solenmly cursed Wright, 
 Smith, and a third Semitic sch(dar in the Sacred Name. All three died 
 soon afterwards. 
 
 What would have been thouijht of this in the Middle Ages !
 
 320 Biographical Studies 
 
 school of Oriental studies on the foundations laid 
 by Wright, and with the help of an eminent 
 Syriac scholar, Bensley, were proving successful, 
 and a considerable number of able young men 
 were gathering round him, when (in 1890) the 
 hand of disease fell upon him, obliging him first 
 to curtail and afterwards to intermit his lectures. 
 The last year of his life was a year of suffering, 
 borne with uncomplaining fortitude. 
 
 What with work on the EncyclopcEdia Britan- 
 nica, with the distractions of his prolonged trial, 
 with the time spent in oral teaching, and with 
 the physical weakness of his latest years. Smith's 
 leisure available for literary production was not 
 large, and the books he has left do not adequately 
 represent either his accumulated knowledge or 
 his faculty of investigation. The earlier books 
 The Old Testament in the Jewish ChurcJi and 
 The Prophets of Israel (the latter a series of 
 lectures delivered at Glasgow) are comparatively 
 popular in handling. The two later Kinship 
 and Ma7'riage in Early Arabia and The Religion 
 of the Semites are more abstruse and technical^ 
 and also more original, dealing with topics in 
 which their author was a pioneer, though he 
 had been influenced by, and acknowledged in 
 the amplest way his obligations to, his friend 
 John F. Maclennan, the author of Primitive 
 Marriage. The Religion of the Semites, though 
 masterly in plan and execution, and though it
 
 William Robertson Smith 321 
 
 has excited the admiration of the few Oriental 
 scholars competent to appraise its substantial 
 merit, suffers from its incompleteness. Only 
 the first volume was published, for death over- 
 took the author before he could put into 
 final shape the materials he had collected for the 
 full development of his theories. As the second 
 volume would have traced the connection between 
 the primitive religion of the Arab branches of the 
 Semitic stock (including Israel) and the Hebrew 
 religion as we have it in the earlier books of the Old 
 Testament, the absence of this finished statement 
 is a loss to science. Changes had passed upon 
 his views since he wrote the incriminated articles, 
 and he said to me (I think about 1S88) that he 
 would no longer undertake any clerical duties. 
 He had a sensitive conscience, and held that no 
 clergyman ought to use language in the pulpit 
 which did not express his personal convictions. 
 
 What struck one most in Robertson Smith's 
 writings was the easy command wherewith he 
 handled his materials. His generalisations were 
 based on an endlessly patient and careful study of 
 details, a study in which he never lost sight of 
 guiding principles. With perfect lucidity and an 
 unstrained natural vigour, there was a sense of 
 abounding and overflowing knowledge which in- 
 spired confidence in the reader, making him feel 
 he was in the hands of a master. On all that 
 pertained to the languages and literature of the
 
 322 Biographical Studies 
 
 Arabic branch of the Semitic races, ancient and 
 modern (for he did not claim to be an Assyriolo- 
 gist), his knowledge was accurate no less than 
 comprehensive. Full of deference to the great 
 scholars no one spoke with a warmer admiration 
 of Noldeke, Wellhausen, and Lagarde than he did 
 he was a stringent critic of unscientific work in 
 the sphere of history and physics as well as in 
 that of philology, quick to expose the uncritical 
 assumptions or loose hypotheses of less careful 
 though more pretentious students. He used to 
 say that when he had disposed of the Encyclopcsdia 
 Britannica, he might undertake a " Dictionary of 
 European Impostors." Oriental lore was only 
 one of many subjects in which he might have 
 achieved distinction. His mathematical talents 
 were remarkable, and during two sessions he 
 taught with conspicuous success the class of 
 Natural Philosophy in the University of Edin- 
 burgh as assistant professor. He had a com- 
 petent acquaintance with not a few other practical 
 arts, including navigation, and once, when the 
 compasses of the vessel on which he was sailing 
 in the Red Sea got out of order, he proved to be 
 the person on board most competent to set them 
 right. In metaphysics and theology, in ancient 
 history and many departments of modern history, 
 he was thoroughly at home. Few, indeed, were 
 the subjects that came up in the course of con- 
 versation on which he was not able to throw light.
 
 William Robertson Smith 323 
 
 for the range of his acquirements was not more 
 striking than the swiftness and precision with 
 which he brought knowledge to bear wherever 
 it was wanted. 
 
 There was hardly a hue of practical life in 
 which he might not have attained a brilliant 
 success. But the passion for knowledge made 
 him prefer the life of a scholar, and seemed to 
 have quenched any desire even for literary fame. 
 
 Learning is commonly thought of as a weight 
 to be carried, which makes men dull, heavy, or 
 pedantic. With Robertson Smith the effect seemed 
 to be exactly the opposite. Because he knew so 
 much, he was interested in everything, and threw 
 himself with a joyous freshness and keenness into 
 talk alike upon the most serious and the lightest 
 topics. He was combative, apt to traverse a propo- 
 sition when first advanced, even though he might 
 come round to it afterwards ; and a discussion 
 with him taxed the defensive acumen of his 
 companions. Having once spent five weeks 
 alone with him in a villa at Alassio on the 
 Riviera, I observed to him when we parted 
 that we had had (as the Americans say) "a 
 lovely time " together, and that there was not 
 an observation I had made during those weeks 
 which he had not contested. He laughed 
 and did not contest that observation. Yet this 
 tendency, while it made his society more stimu- 
 lating, did not make it less agreeable, because
 
 324 Biographical Studies 
 
 he never seemed to seek to overthrow an 
 adversary, but only to get at the truth of the 
 case, and his manner, though positive, had about 
 it nothing either acrid or conceited. One could 
 imagine no keener intellectual pleasure than his 
 company afforded, for there was, along with an 
 exuberant wealth of thought and knowledge, an 
 intensity and ardour which lit up every subject 
 which it touched. I once invited him and John 
 Richard Green (the historian) to meet at dinner. 
 They took to one another at once, nor was it easy 
 to say which lamp burned the brighter. Smith 
 had wider and more accurate learning, and stronger 
 logical power, but Green was just as swift, just as 
 fertile, just as ingenious. In stature Smith, like 
 Green, was small, almost diminutive ; his dark 
 brown eyes bright and keen ; his speech rapid ; 
 his laugh ready and merry, for he had a quick 
 sense of humour and a power of enjoying things 
 as they came. The type of intellect suggested 
 a Teutonic Scot of the Lowlands, but in appear- 
 ance and temperament he was rather a Scottish 
 Celt of the Highlands, with a fire and a gaiety, 
 an abounding vivacity and vitality, which made 
 him a conspicuous figure wherever he lived, in 
 Aberdeen, in Edinburgh, in Cambridge. Even 
 by his walk, with its quick, irregular roll, one could 
 single him out at a distance in the street. 
 
 When a man is attractive personally, he is 
 all the more attractive for being unlike other
 
 William Robertson Smith 325 
 
 men, and he often becomes the centre of a 
 group. This was the case with Smith. His 
 numerous friends were so much interested by 
 him that when they met their talk was largely 
 of him, and many friendships were based on 
 a common knowledge of this one person. In- 
 deed, the geniality, elevation, and simplicity of 
 his character gave him a quite unusual hold on 
 those who had come to know him well. Few 
 men, leading an equally quiet and studious life, 
 have inspired so much regard and affection in so 
 large a number of persons ; few teachers have had 
 an equal power of stimulating and attracting their 
 pupils. He loved teaching hardly less than he 
 loved the investigation of truth, and he was the 
 most faithful and sympathetic of friends, one 
 who was felt to be unique while he lived and 
 irreplaceable when he had departed. 
 
 I have spoken of the courage he had shown 
 in confronting his antagonists in the ecclesiastical 
 courts. That couraQ-e did not fail him in the 
 severer trials of his last illness. The nature of 
 the disease of which he died was disclosed to 
 him by his physician in September 1892, while 
 an international Congress of Orientalists, in which 
 he presided over the Semitic section, was holding 
 its meetings. A festival dinner was being given 
 in honour of the Congress the same afternoon. 
 When the physician had spoken. Smith simply 
 remarked, " This means the death my brother
 
 326 Biographical Studies 
 
 died " (one of his brothers had been struck by 
 the same malady a few years before). He went 
 straight to the dinner, and was throughout the 
 evening the gayest and brightest of the guests. 
 
 Fancy sometimes indulges herself in imagining 
 what part the eminent men one has known would 
 have played had their lot been cast in some other 
 age. So I have fancied that Archbishop Tait 
 (described in an earlier chapter) ought to have 
 been Primate of England under Edward the 
 Sixth or Elizabeth. He would have guided the 
 course of reform more prudently and more firmly 
 than Cranmer did; he would have shown a broader 
 spirit than did Parker or Whitgift. So Cardinal 
 Manning, had he lived in the seventeenth century, 
 might haply have become General of the Jesuit 
 Order, and enjoyed the secret control of the politics 
 of the Catholic world. So Robertson Smith, had 
 he been born in the great age of the mediaeval 
 universities, might, like the bold dialectician of 
 whom Dante speaks, have "syllogised invidious 
 truths " ^ in the University of Paris ; or had Fortune 
 placed him two centuries later among the scholars 
 of the Italian Renaissance in its glorious prime, 
 the fame of his learning might have filled half 
 Europe. 
 
 - Parad. x. 136, of vSigier, " Sillogizzo invidiosi veri."
 
 HENRY SIDGWICK 
 
 Henry Sidgwick was born at Skipton, in York- 
 shire, where his father was headmaster of the 
 ancient grammar school of the town, on 3rst 
 May 1838/ The family belonged to Yorkshire. 
 He was a precocious boy, and used to delight his 
 brothers and sister by the fertility of his imagina- 
 tion in inventing games and stories. Educated 
 at Rugby School under Goulburn (afterwards 
 Dean of Norwich), he was sent at an unusually 
 early age to Trinity College, Cambridge. His 
 brilliant University career was crowned by the 
 hrst place in the classical tripos and by a first 
 class in the mathematical tripos, and he was 
 speedily elected a Fellow of Trinity. Intel- 
 lectual curiosity and an interest in the prob- 
 lems of theology presently drev/ him to Germany, 
 where he worked at Hebrew and Arabic under 
 Ewald at Gottingen, as well as with other 
 eminent teachers. After hesitating for a time 
 whether to devote himself to Oriental studies 
 or to classical scholarship, he was drawn back to 
 
 It is hoped that a life of SiilL;wick, together with .1 selectioii from 
 his letters, may before long he piihlishe'l. 
 
 327
 
 328 Biographical Studies 
 
 philosophy by his desire to investigate questions 
 bearing on natural theology, and finally settled 
 down to the pursuit of what are called in Cam- 
 bridge the moral sciences metaphysics, ethics, and 
 psychology ; becoming first a College Lecturer 
 and then (in 1875) Prselector in Moral and Poli- 
 tical Philosophy. In 1869 he resigned his fellow- 
 ship, feeling that he could no longer consider 
 himself a '' bona fide member of the Church of 
 England," that being the condition then attached 
 by law to the holding of fellowships in the 
 Colleges at Cambridge. This step caused surprise, 
 for the test was deemed a very vague and light 
 one, having been recently substituted for a more 
 stringent requirement, and there had been many 
 holders of fellowships who were at least as little 
 entitled to call themselves bona fide members 
 of the Established Church as he was. But, 
 as was afterwards said of him by Mrs. Cross 
 (George Eliot), Sidgwick was expected by his 
 intimate friends to conform to standards higher 
 than average men prescribe for their own con- 
 duct. Taken in conjunction with the fact that 
 several English Dissenters and Scottish Presby- 
 terians had won the distinction of a Senior 
 Wranglership and been debarred from fellowships, 
 though they were in theological opinion more 
 orthodox than some nominal members of the 
 Established Church who were holding fellowships, 
 Sidgwick's conscientious act made a great im-
 
 Henry Sidgvvick 329 
 
 pression in Cambridge and did much to hasten 
 that total aboHtion of tests in the Universities 
 which was effected by statute in 1S71 ; for in 
 England concrete instances of hardship and in- 
 justice are more powerful incitements to reform 
 than the strongest abstract arguments, and Sidg- 
 wick was already so eminent and so respected 
 a figure that all Cambridge felt the absurdity of 
 excludinof such a man from its honours and emolu- 
 ments. In 1883 he was appointed Professor of 
 Moral Philosophy, and continued to hold that post 
 till three months before his death in 1900, when 
 failing health determined him to resign it. 
 
 His life was the still and tranquil life of the 
 thinker, teacher, and writer, varied by no events 
 more excitino^ than those controversies over 
 reforms in the studies and organisation of the 
 University in which his sense of public duty 
 frequently led him to bear a part. 
 
 These I pass over, but there is one branch of 
 his active work to which special reference ought 
 to be made, viz. the part he took in promoting the 
 University education of women. In or about the 
 year 1868 he joined with the late Miss Anne 
 Jane Clough (sister of the poet Arthur Clough) 
 and a few other friends in establishing a course 
 of lectures and a hall of residence for women 
 at Cambridofe, which crrew into the institution 
 called Xewnham College. It and Girton College, 
 founded by other friends of the same cause
 
 330 Biographical Studies 
 
 about the same time, were the first two insti- 
 tutions in England which provided for women, 
 together with residential accommodation, a com- 
 plete University training equivalent and similar 
 to that provided by the two ancient English 
 universities for men. The teaching was mainly 
 given by the University professors and lecturers, 
 the curriculum was the same as the University 
 prescribed, and the women students, though not 
 legally admitted to the University, were ex- 
 amined by the University examiners at the same 
 time as the other students. Henry Sidgwick 
 was, from the foundation of Newnham onwards, 
 the moving spirit and the guiding hand among 
 its University friends, the spirit which inspired 
 the policy and the hand which piloted the 
 fortunes of the College. Its growth to its present 
 dimensions, and its usefulness, not only directly, 
 but through the example it has set, have been 
 largely due to his assiduous care and temperate 
 wisdom. He had married (in 1876) Miss Eleanor 
 Mildred Balfour, and when she accepted the princi- 
 palship of Newnham after Miss Clough's death, in 
 1889, he and she transferred their residence to 
 the College, and lived thenceforward at it. The 
 England of our time has seen no movement of 
 opinion more remarkable or more beneficial than 
 that which has recognised the claims of women 
 to the highest kind of education, and secured a 
 substantial, if still incomplete, provision therefor.
 
 Henry Sidgwick 331 
 
 The change has come so quietly and unob- 
 trusively that few people realise how great it 
 is. Few, indeed, remember what things were 
 forty years ago, as few realise when waste lands 
 have been stubbed and drained and tilled what 
 they were like in their former state. No one did 
 more than Sidgwick to bring about this change. 
 Besides his work for Newnham, he took a lead 
 in all the movements that have been made to 
 obtain for women a fuller admission to University 
 privileges, and well deserved the gratitude of 
 Englishwomen for his unceasing efforts on their 
 behalf. 
 
 The obscure problems of psychology had a 
 great attraction for him, and he spent much time 
 in investio-atinof them, beincr one of the founders, 
 and remaining all through his later life a leading 
 and guiding member, of the Society tor Psychicrd 
 Research, which has for the last twenty years 
 cultivated this field with an industry and ability 
 Vvhich have deserved larafer harvests than have 
 yet been reaped. Two remarkable men, both 
 devoted friends of his, worked with him, Edmund 
 Gurney and Frederic Myers the poet, the latter 
 of whom survived him a few months only. It 
 was characteristic of Sidgwick that he never com- 
 mitted himself to any of the bold and possibly 
 over-sanguine anticipations formed by some ot 
 the other members of the Societx', while yet he 
 never was deterred by failure, or by the discover)-
 
 332 Biographical Studies 
 
 of deceptions, sometimes elaborate and long sus- 
 tained, from pursuing inquiries which seemed to 
 him to have an ultimate promise of valuable 
 results. The phenomena, he would say, may be 
 true or false ; anyhow they deserve investigation. 
 The mere fact that so many persons believe them 
 to be genuine is a problem fit to be investigated. 
 If they are false, it will be a service to have 
 proved them so. If they contain some truth, 
 it is truth of a kind so absolutely new as to be 
 worth much effort and long effort to reach it. In 
 any case, science ought to take the subject out of 
 the hands of charlatans. 
 
 The main business of his life, however, was 
 teaching and writing. Three books stand out as 
 those by which he will be best remembered his 
 Methods of Ethics, his Principles of Political 
 Economy, and his Ele7nents of Politics. All three 
 have won the admiration of those who are experts 
 in the subjects to which they respectively relate, 
 and they continue to be widely read in uni- 
 versities both in Britain and in America. All 
 three bear alike the peculiar impress of his mind. 
 
 It was a mind of singular subtlety, fertility, 
 and ingenuity, which applied to every topic an 
 extremely minute and patient analysis. Never 
 satisfied with the obvious view of a question, 
 it seemed unable to acquiesce in any broad and 
 sweeping statement. It discovered objections to 
 every accepted doctrine, exceptions to every rule.
 
 Henry Sidgwick 33 
 
 It perceived minute distinctions and qualifications 
 which had escaped the notice of previous writers. 
 These quaHties made Sidgwick's books somewhat 
 difficult reading for a beginner, who was apt to 
 ask what, after all, was the conclusion to which he 
 had been led by an author who showed him the 
 subject in various lights, and added not a few minor 
 propositions to that which had seemed to be the 
 governing one. But the student who had already 
 some knowledge of the topic, who, though he 
 apprehended its main principles, had not followed 
 them out in detail or perceived the difficulties in 
 applying them, gained immensely by having so 
 many fresh points presented to him, so many 
 fallacies lurking in currently accepted notions 
 detected, so many conditions indicated which 
 might qualify the amplitude of a general pro- 
 position. The method of discussion was stimu- 
 lating. Sometimes it reminded one of the Socratic 
 method as it appears in Plato, but more fre- 
 quently it was the method of Aristotle, who 
 discusses a subject first from one side, then from 
 another, throws out a number of remarks, not 
 always reconcilable, but always suggestive, re- 
 garding it, and finally arrives at a view which he 
 delivers as being probably the best, but one 
 which must be taken subject to the remarks 
 previously made. The reader often feels in 
 Sidgwick's treatment of a subject as he often 
 feels in Aristotle's, that he would like to be left
 
 334 Biographical Studies 
 
 with something more definite and positive, some- 
 thing that can be easily dehvered to learners as 
 an established truth. He desires a bolder and 
 broader sweep of the brush. But he also feels 
 how much he is benefited by the process of 
 sifting and analysing to which every conception 
 or dogma is subjected, and he perceives that 
 he is more able to handle it afterwards in his 
 own way when his attention has been called to 
 all these distinctions and qualifications or anti- 
 nomies which would have escaped any vision less 
 keen than his author's. For those who, in an age 
 prone to hasty reading and careless thinking, are 
 disposed to underrate the difficulties of economic 
 and political questions, and to walk in a vain 
 conceit of knowledge because they have picked 
 up some large generalisations, no better discipline 
 can be prescribed than to follow patiently such 
 a treatment as Sidgwick gives ; nor can any 
 reader fail to profit from the candour and the 
 love of truth which illumine his discussion of a 
 subject. 
 
 The love of truth and the sense of duty guided 
 his life as well as his pen. Though always 
 warmly interested in politics, he was of all the 
 persons I have known the least disposed to be 
 warped by partisanship, for he examined each 
 political issue as it arose on its own merits, apart 
 from predilections for either party or for the 
 views of his nearest friends. We used to wonder
 
 Henry Sidgwick 335 
 
 how such splendid impartiality would have stood a 
 practical test such as that of the House of Com- 
 mons. His loyalty to civic duty was so strong as 
 on one occasion to bring him, in the middle of 
 his vacation, all the way from Davos, in the 
 easternmost corner of Switzerland, to Cambridge, 
 solely that he might record his vote at a parlia- 
 mentary election, although the result of the election 
 was already virtually certain. 
 
 Sidgwick's attitude toward the Benthamite 
 svstem of Utilitarianism illustrates the cautiously 
 discriminative habit of mind I have sought to 
 describe. If he had been required to call him- 
 self by any name, he would not have refused that 
 of Utilitarian, just as in mental philosophy he 
 leaned to the type of thought represented by the 
 two Mills rather than to the Kantian idealism of 
 his friend and school contemporary, the Oxford 
 professor T. H. Green. But the system of 
 Utility takes in his hands a form so much more 
 refined and delicate than was given to it by 
 Bentham and James Mill, and is expounded with 
 so many qualifications unknown to them, that it 
 has become a very different thing, and is scarcely, 
 if at all, assailable by the arguments which moral- 
 ists of the idealistic type have brought against 
 the older doctrine. Something similar may be 
 said of his treatment of bimetallism in his book 
 on political economy. While assenting to some of 
 the general propositions on which the bimetallic
 
 33^ Biographical Studies 
 
 theory rests, he points out so many difficulties in 
 the application of that theory to the actual con- 
 ditions of currency that his assent cannot be cited 
 as a deliverance in favour of trying to turn theory 
 into practice. He told me in 1896 that he held 
 the political and other practical objections to an 
 attempt to establish a bimetallic system to be virtu- 
 ally insuperable. When he treats of free trade, he 
 is no less guarded and discriminating. He points 
 out various circumstances or conditions under 
 which a protective tariff may become, at least 
 for a time, justifiable, but never abandons the 
 free trade principle as being generally true and 
 sound, a principle not to be departed from 
 save for strong reasons of a local or temporary 
 kind. His general economic position is equally 
 removed from the " high and dry " school of 
 Ricardo on the one hand, and from the "Katheder- 
 Sozialisten " and the modern " sentimental " school 
 on the other. In all his books one notes a tend- 
 ency to discover what can be said for the view 
 which is in popular disfavour, even often for 
 that which he does not himself adopt, and to 
 set forth all the objections to the view which 
 is to receive his ultimate adhesion. There is a 
 danger with such a method of losing breadth and 
 force of effect. One is ready to cry, " Do lapse 
 for a moment into dogmatism." Yet it ought to be 
 added that Sidgwick's subtlety is always restrained 
 by practical good sense, as well as by the desire to
 
 Henry Sidgwick 337 
 
 reconcile opposite views. His arguments, though 
 they often turn on minute distinctions, are not 
 bits of fine-drawn ingenuity, but have weight and 
 substance in them/ 
 
 One book of his which has not yet (December 
 1902) been pubHshed, but which I have had the 
 privilege of reading in proof, displays his con- 
 structive power in another light. It is a course 
 of lectures on the development of political institu- 
 tions in Europe from early times down to our 
 own. Here, as he is dealiuQ- with concrete matter, 
 the treatment is more broad, and the line of 
 exposition and argument more easy to follow, than 
 in the treatises already referred to. It is a masterly 
 piece of work, and reveals a wider range of 
 historical knowledge and a more complete mastery 
 of historical method than had been shown in his 
 earlier books, or indeed than some of his friends 
 had known him to possess. 
 
 The tendency to analysis rather than to con- 
 struction, the abstention from the deliverance of 
 doctrines easy to comprehend and repeat, which 
 belong to his writings on ethics and economics, 
 do not impair the worth of his literary criticisms. 
 In this field his fme perception and discriminative 
 
 It was his aim to avoid as nnicli as [)os,-.il)lc technical terms or phrases 
 whose nieaniiiL; was not plain to the averai^e reader. An anecdote v\as 
 current that once when, in conductin.L; a universit)- examination, he was 
 perusinj^ the papers of a candidate who had darkened the sutjject hy the 
 use of extreme Ilesjelian phraseology, he turned to his co-examiner and 
 said, "I can see that this is nonsense, but is it the right kind of nonsense?" 
 
 Z
 
 33^ Biographical Studies 
 
 taste had full scope. He was an incessant reader, 
 especially of poetry and novels, with a retentive 
 memory for poetry, as well as a finely modulated 
 and expressive voice in reciting it. His literary 
 judgments had less of a creative quality, if the 
 expression be permissible, than Matthew Arnold's, 
 but are not otherwise inferior to those of that 
 brilliant though sometimes slightly prejudiced 
 critic. No one of his contemporaries has sur- 
 passed Sidgwick in catholicity and reasonableness, 
 in the power of delicate appreciation, or in an 
 exquisite precision of expression. His essay on 
 Arthur Hugh Clough, prefixed to the latest edition 
 of Clough 's collected poems, is a good specimen 
 of this side of his talent. Clough was one of 
 his favourites, and has indeed been called the 
 pet poet of University men. Sidgwick's literary 
 essays, which appeared occasionally in magazines, 
 were few, but they well deserve to be collected and 
 republished, for this age of ours, though largely 
 occupied in talking about literature, has produced 
 comparatively little criticism of the first order. 
 
 Sidgwick did not write swiftly or easily, be- 
 cause he weighed carefully everything he wrote. 
 But his mind was alert and nimble in the highest 
 degree. Thus he was an admirable talker, seeing 
 in a moment the point of an argument, seizing on 
 distinctions which others had failed to perceive, 
 suggesting new aspects from which a question 
 might be regarded, and enlivening every topic
 
 Henry Sidgwick 339 
 
 by a keen yet sweet and kindly wit. Wit, 
 seldom allowed to have play in his books, 
 was one of the characteristics which made his 
 company charming. Its effect was heightened 
 by a hesitation in his speech which often 
 forced him to pause before the critical word 
 or phrase of the sentence had been reached. 
 When that word or phrase came, it was sure 
 to be the rifjht one. Though fond of areuingf, 
 he was so candid and fair, admitting all that 
 there was in his opponent's case, and obviously 
 trying to see the point from his opponent's side, 
 that nobody felt annoyed at having come off 
 second best, while everybody who cared for good 
 talk went away feeling not only that he knew 
 more about the matter than he did before, but 
 that he had enjoyed an intellectual pleasure of a 
 rare and high kind. The keenness of his penetra- 
 tion was not formidable, because it was joined 
 to an indulgent judgment : the ceaseless activity 
 of his intellect was softened rather than reduced 
 by the gaiety of his manner. Mis talk was con- 
 versation, not discourse, for though he naturally 
 became the centre of nearly every company in 
 which he found himself, he took no more than 
 his share. It was like the sparkling of a brook 
 whose ripples seem to give out sunshine. 
 
 Though Sidgwick's writings are a mine of 
 careful and suggestive thinking, he was even 
 more remarkable than his books. Though his
 
 340 Biographical Studies 
 
 conversation was delightful, the impression of its 
 fertility and its wit was the least part of the 
 impression which his personality produced. An 
 eminent man is known to the world at large by 
 what he gives them in the way of instruction or 
 of pleasure. A man is prized and remembered 
 by his friends for what he was in the intercourse 
 of life. Few men of our time have influenced 
 so wide or so devoted a circle of friends as did 
 Henry Sidgwick ; few could respond to the calls 
 of friendship with a like sympathy or wisdom. 
 His advice was frequently asked in delicate 
 questions of conduct, and he was humorously 
 reminded that, by his own capacity as well as 
 by the title of his chair, he was a professor of 
 casuistry. His stores of knowledge and helpful 
 criticism were always at the service of his pupils 
 or his fellow-workers. 
 
 From his earliest college days he had been 
 just, well-balanced, conscientious alike in the pur- 
 suit of truth and in the regulation of his own life, 
 appearing to have neither prejudices nor enmities, 
 and when he had to convey censure, choosing the 
 least cutting words in which to convey it. Yet 
 in earlier years there had been in him a touch 
 of austerity, a certain remoteness or air of de- 
 tachment, which confined to a very few persons 
 the knowledge of his highest qualities. As he 
 grew older his purity lost its coldness, his keen- 
 ness of discernment mellowed into a sweet and
 
 Henry Sidgwick 341 
 
 persuasive wisdom. A life excellently conducted, 
 a life which is the expression of fine qualities, and 
 in which the acts done are in harmony with the 
 thoughts and words of the man, is itself a beauti- 
 ful product, whether of untutored nature or of 
 thought and experience turning every faculty to 
 the best account. In the modern world the two 
 types of excellence which we are chiefly bidden 
 to admire are that of the active philanthropist 
 and that of the saint. The ancient world pro- 
 duced and admired another type, to which some 
 of its noblest characters conformed, and which, in 
 its softer and more benignant aspect, Sidgwick 
 presented. In his indifference to wealth and 
 fame and the other familiar objects of human 
 desire, in the almost ascetic simplicity of his daily 
 life, in his ])ursuit of none but the purest pleasures, 
 in his habit of subjecting all impulses to the law 
 of reason, the will braced to patience, the soul 
 brought into harmony with the divinely appointed 
 order, he seemed to reproduce one of those philo- 
 sophers of antiquity who formed a lofty concep- 
 tion of Nature and sought to live in conformity 
 with her precepts. But the gravity of a Stoic 
 was relieved by the humour and vivacity which 
 l^elonged to his nature, and the severity of a Stoic 
 was softened by the tenderness and sympathy 
 which seemed to grow and expand with every 
 year. In Cambridge, where, though the society 
 is a large one, all the teachers become personally
 
 342 Biographical Studies 
 
 known to one another, and the students have 
 opportunities of famihar intercourse with the 
 teachers, affection as well as admiration gathered 
 round him. His thoughts quickened and his 
 example inspired generation after generation of 
 young men passing through the University out 
 into the life of England, as a light set high upon 
 the bank beams on the waves of a river gliding 
 swiftly to the sea. 
 
 It was a life of single-minded devotion to truth 
 and friendship, a life serene and gentle, free alike 
 from vanity and from ambition, bearing without 
 complaint the ill-health which sometimes checked 
 his labours, viewing with calm fortitude those 
 problems of man's life on which his mind was 
 always fixed, untroubled in the presence of death, 
 
 Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas 
 Quique metus omnes et inexorabile fatum 
 Subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari. 
 
 When his friends heard of his departure there 
 rose to mind the words in which the closing scene of 
 the life of Socrates is described by the greatest of 
 his disciples, and we thought that among all those 
 we had known there was none of whom we could 
 more truly say that In him the spirit of philosophy 
 had its perfect work in justice, In goodness, and 
 in wisdom.
 
 EDWARD ERNEST BOWEN' 
 
 Ever since the publication of Stanley's Life of 
 Dr. Arnold that eminent headmaster has been 
 taken as the model of a cjreat teacher and ruler 
 of bovs. the man who, while stimulating: the in- 
 telligence of his pupils, was even more concerned 
 to discipline and mould their moral natures. 
 Arnold has become the type of what Carlyle 
 might have called " The Hero as Schoolmaster." 
 Though there have been many able men at the 
 head of large schools since his time, including 
 three who afterwards rose to be Archbishops of 
 Canterbury, as well as a good many who have 
 become bishops, his fame remains unrivalled, and 
 the type created by his career, or rather perhaps by 
 his biographer's account of it, still holds the field 
 Moreover, during the sixty years that have passed 
 since Arnold's death scarcely a word has been 
 said regarding any other masters than the head. 
 During those years the English universities have 
 sent into the great schools a large proportion of 
 
 ' Since this sliclch was wrillen a very interesting /.i/e of Edward 
 lioiicn by his nephew (the I fon. and l\c\-. W. V.. Ildwen) has appeared. 
 Some f)f his (too few) essays and a collection of his school -songs are 
 appended to it. 
 
 343
 
 344- Biographical Studies 
 
 their most capable graduates as assistant teachers ; 
 and some of the strongest men among these 
 graduates have never, from various causes, and 
 often because they preferred to remain laymen, 
 been" raised to the headships of the schools. 
 Every one knows that a school depends for its 
 wellbeing and success more largely on the assist- 
 ants'^ taken together than it does on the head- 
 master. Most people also know that individual 
 assistant masters are not unfrequently better 
 scholars, better teachers, and more influential 
 with the boys than is their official superior. Yet 
 the'^'assistant masters have remained unhonoured 
 and unsung in the general chorus of praise of the 
 great schools which has been resounding over 
 England for nearly two generations. 
 
 Edward Bowen was all his life an assistant 
 master, and never cared to be anything else. As 
 he^had determined not to take orders in the Church 
 of England, he was virtually debarred from many 
 of the chief headmasterships, which are, some few 
 of them by law, many more by custom, confined 
 to Anglican clergymen. But even when other 
 headships to which this condition was not attached 
 were known to be practically open to his accept- 
 ance, were, indeed, in one or two instances almost 
 tendered to him, he refused to become a candidate, 
 preferring his own simple and easy way of life 
 to the pomp and circumstance which conven- 
 tion requires a headmaster to maintain. This
 
 Edward Bowen 345 
 
 abstention, however, did not prevent his eminence 
 from becoming known to those who had oppor- 
 tunities of judging. In his later years he would, 
 I think, have been generally recognised by the 
 teaching profession as the most brilliant, and in 
 his own peculiar line the most successful, man 
 among the schoolmasters of Britain. 
 
 He was born on 30th March 1836, of an Irish 
 family (originally from Wales) holding property 
 in the county of Mayo. His father was a clergy- 
 man of the Church of England ; his mother, 
 who survived him a few months (dying at the 
 age of ninety -four) and whom he tended with 
 watchful care during her years of widowhood, 
 was partly of Irish, partly of French extraction. 
 Like his more famous but perhaps not more 
 remarkable elder brother, Charles Bowen. who 
 became Lord Bowen, and is remembered as 
 one of the most acute and subtle judges as 
 well as one of the most w^'nning personalities 
 of our time, he had a gaiety, wit, and versatility 
 which suggested the presence of Celtic blood. 
 He was educated at Blackheath School, and 
 afterwards at King's College in London, whence 
 he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 In i860, after a career at the University, dis- 
 tinguished both in the way of honours and in 
 respect of the reputation he won among his 
 contemporaries, he became a master at Harrow, 
 and thenceforth remained there, leading an
 
 34^ Biographical Studies 
 
 uneventful and externally a monotonous life, 
 but one full of unceasing and untiring activity 
 in play and work. He died on Easter Monday 
 1 90 1. 
 
 Nothing could be less like the traditional 
 Arnoldine methods of teaching and ruling boys 
 than Bowen's method was. The note of those 
 methods was what used to be called moral 
 earnestness. Arnold was orrave and serious, 
 distant and awe-inspiring, except perhaps to a 
 few specially favoured pupils. Bowen was light, 
 cheerful, vivacious, humorous, familiar, and, above 
 all things, ingenious and full of variety. His 
 leading principles were two that the boy must 
 at all hazards be interested in the lessons and 
 that he should be at ease with the teacher. 
 
 A Harrow boy once said to his master, 
 " I don't know how it is, sir, but if Mr. Bowen 
 takes a lesson he makes you work twice as hard 
 as other masters, but you like it twice as much 
 and you learn far more." He was the most 
 unexpected man in conversation that could be 
 imagined, always giving a new turn to talk by 
 saying something that seemed remote from the 
 matter in hand until he presently showed the 
 connection. So his teaching kept the boys 
 alert, because its variety was inexhaustible. He 
 seemed to think that it did not greatly matter 
 what the lesson was so long as the pupil could be 
 got to enjoy it. The rules of the school and the
 
 Edward Bowen 347 
 
 requirements of the examinations for which boys 
 had to be prepared would not have permitted 
 him to try to any great extent the experiment 
 of varying subjects to suit individual tastes ; but 
 he was fond of giving lessons in topics outside 
 the regular course, on astronomy for instance, of 
 which he had acquired a fair knowledge, and on 
 recent military history, which he knew wonderfully 
 well, better probably than any man in England out- 
 side the military profession. When the so-called 
 "modern side" was established at Harrow, in 1869, 
 he became head of it, having taken this post, not 
 from any want of classical taste and learning, 
 for he was an admirable scholar, and to the 
 end of his life wrote charming Latin verses, but 
 because he felt that this line of teaching needed 
 to be developed in a school which had been for- 
 merly almost wholly classical. For grammatical 
 minutiae, for learning rules by heart, and indeed 
 for the old style of grammar-teaching generally, 
 he had an unconcealed contempt. He thought it 
 unkind and wasteful to let a boy go on puzzling 
 over difficulties of lanpfuafje in an author, and 
 permitted, under restrictions, the use of English 
 translations, or (as boys call them) ''cribs." 
 Teaching was in his view a special gift ot 
 the individual, which depended on the aptitude 
 for getting hold of the pupil's mind, and 
 enlisting his interest in the subject. He 
 had accordingly no faith in the doctrine that
 
 34^ Biographical Studies 
 
 teaching is a science which can be systematically- 
 studied, or an art in which the apprentice ought to 
 be systematically trained. When he was sum- 
 moned as a witness before the Secondary Educa- 
 tion Commission in 1894 he adhered, under cross- 
 examination, to this view (so far as it affected 
 schools like Harrow or Eton), refusing to be 
 moved by the arguments of those among the 
 Commissioners who cited the practice of Germany, 
 where Padagogik, as they call it, is elaborately 
 taught in the universities. " I am unable," he said, 
 "to conceive any machinery by which the art of 
 teaching can be given practically to masters. That 
 art is so much a matter of personal power and ex- 
 perience, and of various social and moral gifts, 
 that I cannot conceive a good person made a good 
 master by merely seeing a class of boys taught, 
 unless he was allowed to take a real and serious 
 part in it himself, unless he became a teacher him- 
 self. I can understand that at a primary school you 
 can learn by going in and hearing a good teacher at 
 work ; but the teaching of a class of older boys is 
 so different, and has so much of the social element 
 in it, and it may vary so much, that I should 
 despair of teaching a young man how to take a 
 class unless he was a long time with me. ... A 
 master at a large public school is chiefly a moral 
 and social force ; a master is this to a much less 
 extent at a primary school or in the ordinary day- 
 schools, the grammar-schools of the country. To
 
 Edward Bowen 349 
 
 deal with boys when you have them completely 
 under your control for the whole of every day is 
 an altogether different thing, and requires different 
 virtues in the teacher from those that are required 
 in the case of day-schools." 
 
 Bowen may possibly have been mistaken, even 
 as regards the teachers in the great public board- 
 ing schools. His view seems to overlook or 
 disregard that large class of persons who have no 
 marked natural aptitude for teaching, but are cap- 
 able of being, by special instruction and supervised 
 practice, kneaded and moulded into better teachers 
 than they would otherwise have grown to be. He 
 felt so strongly that no one ought to teach without 
 having a real gift and fondness for teaching that 
 he thought such difference as training could make 
 insignificant in comparison with the inborn talent. 
 Perhaps he generalised too boldly from himself, 
 for he had an enjoyment of his work, and a con- 
 scientiousness in always putting the very best of 
 himself into it how much was conscientiousness 
 and how much was enjoyment, no one could tell 
 as well as a quickness and vivacity which no 
 study of methods could have improved. As one 
 of his most eminent colleagues,^ who was also his 
 life-long friend, observes: "The humdrum and 
 routine which must form so large a part of a 
 teacher's life were never humdrum or routine to 
 him, for he put the whole of his abounding 
 
 ' Mr. K. Bo^worlh Smiib..
 
 350 Biographical Studies 
 
 energies into his work, and round its driest details 
 there played and flickered, as with a lambent 
 flame, his joyous spirit, finding expression now 
 perhaps in a striking parallel, now in a startling 
 paradox, now in a touch of humour, and once 
 again in a note of pathos." 
 
 The personal influence he exerted on the boys 
 who lived in his House was quite as remarkable 
 as his "form - teaching." Stoicism and honour 
 were the qualities it was mainly directed to form. 
 Every boy was expected to show manliness and 
 endurance, and to utter no complaint. Where 
 physical health was concerned he was indulgent ; 
 his House was the first which gave the boys meat 
 at breakfast in addition to tea with bread and 
 butter. But otherwise the discipline was Spartan, 
 though not more Spartan than that he prescribed 
 to himself, and the House was trained to scorn the 
 slightest approach to luxury. Arm-chairs were 
 forbidden except to sixth -form boys. A pupil 
 relates that when Bowen found he was in the habit 
 of taking two hot baths a week the transgression 
 was reproved with the words : " Oh boy, that's 
 like the later Romans, boy." His maxims were : 
 " Take sweet and bitter as sweet and bitter come " 
 and " Always play the game." He never preached 
 to the boys or lectured them ; and if he had to 
 convey a reproof, conveyed it in a single sentence. 
 But he dwelt upon honour as the foundation of 
 character, and made every boy feel that he was
 
 Edward Bovven 351 
 
 expected to reach the highest standard of truth- 
 fulness, courage, and duty to the Httle community 
 of the House, or the cricket eleven, or the football 
 team. 
 
 Some have begun to think that in English 
 schools and universities too much time is given to 
 athletic sports, and that they absorb too largely 
 the thoughts and interests of the English youth. 
 Bowen, however, attached the utmost value to 
 games as a training in character. He used to 
 descant upon the qualities of discipline, good- 
 fellowship, good-humour, mutual help, and post- 
 ponement of self which they are calculated to 
 foster. Though some of his friends thought that 
 his own intense and unabated fondness for these 
 games for he played cricket and football up to 
 the end of his life might have biassed his judg- 
 ment, they could not deny that the games ought 
 to develop the qualities aforesaid. 
 
 " Consider the habit of being in public, the for- 
 bearance, the subordination of the one to the many, 
 the exercise of judgment, the sense of personal 
 dignity. Think again of the organising faculty that 
 our games develop. Where can you get command 
 and obedience, choice with responsibility, criticism 
 with discipline, in any degree remotely approaching 
 that in which our social games supply them ? 
 Think of the partly moral, partly physical side of it, 
 temper, of course, dignity, courtesy. . . . When the 
 match has really begun, there is education, there
 
 352 Biographical Studies 
 
 is enlargement of horizon, self sinks, the common 
 good is the only good, the bodily faculties ex- 
 hilarate in functional development, and the make- 
 believe ambition is glorified into a sort of ideality. 
 Here is boyhood at its best, or very nearly at its 
 best. Surs2mt criLra / . . . When you have a lot 
 of human beings, in highest social union and 
 perfect organic action, developing the law of their 
 race and falling in unconsciously with its best 
 inherited traditions of brotherhood and common 
 action, you are not far from getting a glimpse of 
 one side of the highest good. There lives more 
 soul in honest play, believe me, than in half the 
 hymn-books." 
 
 These words, taken from a half-serious essay on 
 Games written for a private society, give some part 
 of Bowen's views. The whole essay is well worth 
 reading.^ Its arguments do not, however, quite 
 settle the matter. The playing of games may have, 
 and indeed ought to have, the excellent results 
 Bowen claimed for it, and yet it may be doubted 
 whether the experience of life shows that boys so 
 brought up do in fact turn out substantially more 
 good-humoured, unselfish, and fit for the commierce 
 of the world than others who have lacked this train- 
 ing. And the further question remains whether the 
 games are worth their costly candle. That they 
 occupy a good deal of time at school and at college 
 is not necessarily an evil, seeing that the time left 
 
 1 It is printed in the Life.
 
 Edward Bowen 353 
 
 for lessons or study is sufficient if well spent. 
 The real drawback incident to the excessive 
 devotion games inspire in our days is that they 
 leave little room in the boy's or collegian's mind 
 either for interest in his studies or for the love 
 of nature. They fill his thoughts, they divert 
 his ambition into channels of no permanent value 
 to his mind or life ; they continue to absorb his 
 interest and form a large part of his reading long 
 after he has left school or college. Neverthe- 
 less, be these things as they may, the opinion 
 of a man so able and so experienced as Bowen 
 was, deserves to be recorded ; and his success in 
 endearing himself to and guiding his boys was 
 doubtless partly due to the use he made of their 
 likino" for Q-ames. 
 
 He was never married, so the school became 
 the sole devotion of his life, and he bequeathed to 
 it the bulk of his property, directing an area of 
 land which he had purchased on the top of the 
 Hill to be always kept as an open space for the 
 benefit of boys and masters. 
 
 It need hardly be said that he loved boys as 
 he loved teachino-. He took them with him in 
 the holidays on walking tours. He kept u[) cor- 
 respondence with many of his pupils after the)' 
 left Harrow, and advised them as occasion rose. 
 To many of them he remained through life the 
 model whom they desired to imitate. I>ut he 
 
 was very chary of the exercise of inlluence. " A 
 
 2 A
 
 354 Biographical Studies 
 
 boy's character," he once wrote, "grows hke the 
 Temple of old, without sound of mallet and 
 trowel. What we can do is to arrange matters 
 so as to give Virtue her best chance. We can 
 make the right choice sometimes a little easier, 
 we can prevent tendencies from blossoming into 
 acts, and render pitfalls visible. How much in- 
 directly and unconsciously we can do, none but 
 the recording angel knows. * You can and you 
 should,' said Chiffers,^ *go straight to the heart of 
 every individual boy.' Well, a fellow -creature's 
 mind is a sacred thing. You may enter into that 
 arcanum once a year, shoeless. And in the effort 
 to control the spirit of a pupil, to make one's own 
 approval his test and mould him by the stress of 
 our own presence, in the ambition to do this, the 
 craving for moral power and visible guiding, the 
 subtle pride of effective agency, lie some of the 
 chief temptations of a schoolmaster's work." 
 
 Such ways and methods as I have endeavoured 
 to describe are less easy to imitate than those 
 which belong to the Arnoldine type of school- 
 master. In Bowen's gaiety, in his vivacity, in the 
 humour which interpenetrated everything he said 
 or did, there was something individual. Teachers 
 who do not possess a like vivacity, versatility, and 
 humour cannot hope to apply with like success 
 the method of familiarity and sympathy. Not 
 indeed that Bowen stood altogether alone in his 
 
 1 " Chifiers " is the typical would-be imitator of Arnold.
 
 Edward Bowen 355 
 
 use of that method. There were others among 
 his contemporaries who shared his view, and whose 
 practice was not dissimilar. He was, however, the 
 earhest and most brilh'ant exponent of the view, 
 so his career may be said to open a new hne, and 
 to mark a new departure in the teacher's art. 
 
 I have mentioned his walkinof tours. He 
 was a pedestrian of extraordinary force, rather 
 tall, but spare and light, swift of foot, and tire- 
 less in his activity. As an undergraduate he 
 had walked from Cambridge to Oxford, nearly 
 ninety miles, in twenty-four hours, scarcely halt- 
 ing. At one time or another he had traversed 
 on foot all the coast-line and great part of the 
 inland regions of England. He was an accom- 
 plished Alpine climber. His passion for exercise 
 of body as well as of mind was so salient a 
 feature in his character that his friends wondered 
 how he would be able to support old age. He 
 was spared the trial, for he was gay and joyous as 
 ever on the last morning of his life, and he died 
 in a moment, while mounting his bicycle after a 
 long ascent, among the lonely forests of Burgundy, 
 then bursting into leaf under an April sun. 
 
 His interest in politics provided hini with 
 a short and strenuous interlude of public action, 
 which varied the even tenor of his life at 1 1 arrow. 
 At the general election of 1880 he stood as a 
 candidate for the little borough of Hertford (which 
 has since been merged in the coLinty) against
 
 35^ Biographical Studies 
 
 Mr. Arthur Balfour, now (1902) First Lord of the 
 Treasury in England. The pro- Turkish policy 
 of Lord Beaconsfield, followed by the Afghan 
 War of 1878, had roused many Liberals who 
 usually took little part in political action. Bowen 
 felt the impulse to denounce the conduct of the 
 Ministry, and went into the contest with his usual 
 airy suddenness. He had little prospect of suc- 
 cess at such a place, for, like many of the so-called 
 Academic Liberals of those days, he made the 
 mistake of standing for a small semi-rural con- 
 stituency, overshadowed by a neighbouring mag- 
 nate, instead of for a large town, where both his 
 opinions and his oratory would have been better 
 appreciated. However, he enjoyed the contest 
 thoroughly, amusing himself as well as the electors 
 by his lively and sometimes impassioned speeches, 
 and he looked back to it as a pleasant episode in 
 his usually smooth and placid life. He was all his 
 life a strong Liberal vieille roc/ie, a lover of free- 
 dom and equality as well as of economy in public 
 finance, a Free Trader, an individualist, an enemy 
 of all wars and all aggressions, and in later years 
 growingly indignant at the rapid increase of 
 military and naval expenditure. He was also, 
 like the Liberals of 1850-60 in general, a sym- 
 pathiser with oppressed nationalities, though this 
 feeling did not carry him the length of accept- 
 ing the policy of Home Rule for Ireland, as 
 to which he had grave doubts, yet doubts not
 
 Edward Bo wen 357 
 
 quite so serious as to involve his separation from 
 the Liberal party. Twice after 1880 he was on 
 the point of becoming a candidate for a seat in 
 the House of Commons, but whether his love for 
 Harrow would have suffered him to remain in 
 Parliament had he entered it may be doubted. One 
 could not even tell whether he was really disap- 
 pointed that his political aspirations remainedunful- 
 filled. Had he given himself to parliamentary life, 
 his readiness, ingenuity, and wit would have soon 
 made him valued by his own side, while his sincerity 
 and engaging manners would have commended 
 him to both sides alike. His delivery was always 
 too rapid, and his voice not powerful, yet these 
 defects would have been forgotten in the interest 
 which so peculiar a figure must have aroused. 
 
 His peace principles contrasted oddly with 
 his passion for militar)' history, a passion which 
 prompted many vacation journeys to battlefields 
 all over Europe, from Salamanca to Austerlitz. 
 He had followed the campaigns of Napoleon 
 through Piedmont and Lombardy, through Ger- 
 many and Austria, as well as those of Wellington 
 in Spain and Southern P'rance.^ This taste is 
 not uncommon in men of peace. Freeman had 
 it ; J. R. Green and S. R. Gardiner had it ; and 
 the historical works of Sir George Trevelyan 
 
 ' lie remarked once that he had so r.early exliaustcd the l>atllerield.s 
 of the past that he must ])et^in to devote liimsdf to the battlefields of the 
 future.
 
 358 Biographical Studies 
 
 and Dr. Thomas Hodgkin prove that it Hves in 
 those genial breasts also. It was a pleasure to 
 be led over a battlefield by Bowen, for he had 
 a good eye for ground, he knew the movements 
 of the armies down to the smallest detail, and he 
 could explain with perfect lucidity the positions of 
 the combatants and the tactical moves in the game. 
 
 Twice only did he come across actual fighting, 
 once at Dtippel in 1864, during the Schleswig- 
 Holstein war, and again in Paris during the siege 
 of the Communards bv the forces that obeved 
 Thiers and the Assembly sitting at Versailles. 
 He maintained that the Commune had been un- 
 fairly judged by Englishmen, and wrote a singu- 
 larly interesting description of what he saw while 
 risking his life in the beleaguered city. There 
 was in him a great spirit of adventure, though the 
 circumstances of his life gave it little scope. 
 
 Travel was one of his chief pleasures, but it 
 was, if possible, a still greater pleasure to his 
 fellow-travellers, for he was the most agreeable 
 of companions, fertile in suggestion, candid in 
 discussion, swift in decision. He cared nothing 
 for luxury and very little for comfort : he was 
 absolutely unselfish and imperturbably good- 
 humoured ; he could get enjoyment out of the 
 smallest incidents of travel, and his curiosity to 
 see the surface of the earth as well as the cities 
 of men was inexhaustible. He loved the un- 
 expected, and if one had written proposing an
 
 Edward Bowen 359 
 
 expedition to explore Tibet, he would have 
 telegraphed back, " Start to-night : do we meet 
 Charing Cross or Mctoria ? " 
 
 I have dwelt on Bowen's gifts and methods 
 as a teacher, because teaching was the joy and 
 the business of his life, and because he showed 
 a new way in which boys might be stimulated 
 and guided. But he was a great deal besides 
 a teacher, just as his brother Charles was a 
 great deal besides a lawyer. Both had talents 
 for literature of a very high order. Charles 
 published a verse translation of Virgil's Eclogzies 
 and the first six books of the Aineid, full of 
 ingenuity and refinement, as well as of fine poetic 
 taste. Edward's vein expressed itself in the 
 writing of songs. His school songs, composed 
 for the Harrow boys, became immensely popular 
 with them, and their use at school celebrations 
 of various kinds has passed from Harrow to 
 the other great schools of England, even 
 to some of the larger girls' schools. The 
 songs are unique in their fanciful ingenuity and 
 humorous extravagance, full of a boyish joy in 
 life, in the exertion of physical strength, in the 
 mimic strife of games, yet with an occasional 
 touch of sadness, like the shadow of a passing 
 cloud as it falls on the cricket field over which 
 the shouts of the players are ringing. The metres 
 are various : all show rhythmical skill, and in all 
 the verse has a swing which makes it singularly
 
 360 Biographical Studies 
 
 effective when sung by a mass of voices. Most 
 of the songs are dedicated to cricket or football, 
 but a few are serious, and two or three of these 
 have a beauty of thought and perfection of form 
 which make the reader ask why a poetic gift so 
 true and so delicate should have been rarely used. 
 These songs were the work of his middle or later 
 years, and he never wrote except when the im- 
 pulse came upon him. The stream ran pure but 
 it ran seldom. In early days he had been for a 
 while, like many other brilliant young University 
 men of his time, a contributor to the Saturday 
 Review. (There surely never was a journal which 
 enlisted so much and such varied literary talent 
 as the Sahirday did between 1855 and 1863.) 
 Bowen's articles were, like his elder brother's, 
 extremely witty. In later life he could seldom 
 be induced to write, having fallen out of the habit, 
 and being, indeed, too busy to carry on any large 
 piece of work ; but the occasional papers on educa- 
 tional subjects he produced showed no decline in 
 his vivacity or in the abundance of his humour. 
 Those who knew the range and the resources 
 of his mind sometimes regretted that he would do 
 nothing to let the world know them. But he 
 was, to a degree most unusual among men of real 
 power, absolutely indifferent, not only to fame, but 
 to opportunities for exercising power or influence. 
 The stoicism which he sought to form in his 
 pupils was inculcated by his own example. It
 
 Edward Bowen 361 
 
 was a genial and cheerful stoicism, which checked 
 neither his affection for them nor his brightness 
 in society, and which permitted him to draw as 
 much enjoyment from small things as most 
 people can from great ones. But if he had 
 the gaiety of an Irishman, he had a double portion 
 of English reserve. He never gave expression 
 in words to his emotions. He never seemed 
 either elated or depressed. He never lost his 
 temper and never seemed to be curbing it. His 
 tastes and way of life were simple to the verge of 
 austerity ; nor did he appear to desire anything 
 more than what he had obtained. 
 
 It is natural possibly foolish, yet almost 
 inevitable that those who perceive in a friend 
 the presence of rare and brilliant gifts should 
 desire that his gifts should not only be turned 
 to full account for the world's benefit, but 
 should become so known and appreciated as 
 to make others admire and value what they 
 admire and value. When such a man prefers to 
 live his life in his own way, and do the plain 
 duties that lie near him, with no thought of 
 anything further, they feel, though they may try 
 to repress, a kind of disappointment, as though 
 greatness or virtue had missed its mark because 
 known to few besides themselves. Vet there is 
 a sense in which that friend is most our own who 
 has least belonged to the world, who has least 
 cared for what the world has to offer, who has
 
 362 Biographical Studies 
 
 chosen the simplest and purest pleasures, who 
 has rendered the service that his way of life 
 required with no longing for any wider theatre 
 or any applause to be there won. Is there indeed 
 anything more beautiful than a life of quiet self- 
 sufficing yet beneficent serenity, such as the 
 ancient philosophers inculcated, a life which is 
 now more rarely than ever led by men of shining 
 gifts, because the inducements to bring such gifts 
 into the dusty thoroughfares of the world have 
 grown more numerous ? Bowen had the best 
 equipment for a philosopher. He knew the things 
 that gave him pleasure, and sought no others. He 
 knew what he could do well. He followed his 
 own bent. His desires were few, and he could 
 gratify them all. He had made life exactly what 
 he wished it to be. Intensely as he enjoyed 
 travel, he never uttered a note of regret when the 
 beginning of a Harrow school term stopped a 
 journey at its most interesting point, so dearly 
 did he love his boys. What more can we desire 
 for our friends than this that in remembering 
 them there should be nothing to regret, that all 
 who came under their influence should feel them- 
 selves for ever thereafter the better for that in- 
 fluence, that a happy and peaceful life should be 
 crowned by a sudden and painless death ?
 
 EDWIN LAWRENXE GODKIN 
 
 As with the progress of science new arts emerge 
 and new occupations and trades are created, so 
 with the progress of society professions pre- 
 viously unknown arise, evolve new types of 
 intellectual excellence, and supply a new theatre 
 for the display of peculiar and exceptional gifts. 
 Such a profession, such a type, and the type 
 which is perhaps most specially characteristic of 
 our times, is that of the Editor, It scarcely 
 existed before the French Revolution, and is, as 
 now fully developed, a product of the last eighty 
 years. Various are its forms. There is the 
 Business Editor, who runs his newspaper as a 
 great commercial undertaking, and may neither 
 care for politics nor attach himself to any political 
 party, America still recollects the familiar 
 example set by James Gordon Bennc-tt, the 
 founder of the N'civ York Herald. There is 
 the Selective Editor, who may never pen a line, 
 but shows his skill in gathering an able staff 
 round him, and in allotting to each of them the 
 work he can do best. Such an one was John 
 Douglas Cook, a man of slender cultivation 
 
 363
 
 364. Biographical Studies 
 
 and few intellectual interests, but still remem- 
 bered in England by those who forty years 
 ago knew the staff of the Saturday Review, 
 then in its brilliant prime, as possessed of an 
 extraordinary instinct for the topics which caught 
 the public taste, and for the persons capable of 
 handling those topics. John T. Delane, of the 
 Times, had the same gift, with talents and 
 knowledge far surpassing Cook's. A third and 
 usually more interesting form is found in the 
 Editor who is himself an able writer, and who 
 imparts his own individuality to the journal he 
 directs. Such an one was Horace Greeley, 
 who, in the days before the War of Secession, 
 made the New York Tribune a power in 
 America. Such another, of finer natural quality, 
 was Michael Katkoff, who in his short career 
 did much to create and to develop the spirit 
 of nationality and imperialism in Russia thirty 
 years ago. 
 
 It was to this third form of the editorial pro- 
 fession that Mr. Godkin belonged. He is the 
 most remarkable example of it that has appeared 
 in our time^ perhaps, indeed, in any time since 
 the profession rose to importance ; and all the 
 more remarkable because he was never, like 
 Greeley or Katkoff, the exponent of any wide- 
 spread sentiment or potent movement, but was 
 frequently in opposition to the feeling for the 
 moment dominant.
 
 E. L, Godkin 365 
 
 Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the son of a Pro- 
 testant clergyman and author, was born in the 
 county of Wicklow, in Ireland, in 1S31. Me 
 was educated at Queen's Collei^e, Belfast, read 
 for a short time for the Eno:lish bar, but drifted 
 into journalism by accepting the post of corre- 
 spondent to the London Daily News during the 
 Crimean War in 1853-54. The horror of war which 
 he retained through his life was due to the glimpse 
 of it he had in the Crimea. Soon afterwards he 
 went to America, was admitted to the bar in New 
 York, but never practised, spent some months in 
 travelling through the Southern States on horse- 
 back, learning thereby what slavery was, and 
 what its economic and social consequences, was 
 for two or three years a writer on the New York 
 Times, and ultimately, in 1865, established in 
 New York a weekly journal called the N^atioii. 
 This he continued to edit, writing most of it 
 himself, till 1881, when he accepted the editor- 
 ship of the Nezu York Eveninq- Post, an old and 
 respectable paper, but with no very large circula- 
 tion. The Nation continued to a[)pear, but be- 
 came practically a weekly edition ot the Ji^voii}!^ 
 Post, or rather, as some one said, the Pveni)ig 
 Post became a daily edition of the N^ at ion, \.ox 
 the tone and spirit that had characterised the 
 iVf?/z'(??^ now pervaded the Post. In 1900 failing 
 health compelled him to retire from active work, 
 and in May 1902 he died in I^ngland. Journalism
 
 366 Biographical Studies 
 
 left him little leisure for any other kind of literary 
 production ; but he wrote in early life a short 
 history of Hungary ; and a number of articles 
 which he had in later years contributed to the 
 Nation or to magazines were collected and pub- 
 lished in three volumes between 1895 and 1900. 
 They are clear and v/ise articles, specially in- 
 structive where they deal with the most recent 
 aspects of democracy. But as they convey a less 
 than adequate impression of the peculiar qualities 
 which established his fame, I pass on to the work 
 by which he will be remembered, his work as a 
 weekly and daily public writer. 
 
 He was well equipped for this career by 
 considerable experience of the world, by large 
 reading, for though not a learned man, he had 
 assimilated a great deal of knowledge on econo- 
 mical and historical subjects, and by a stock 
 of positive principles which he saw clearly and 
 held coherently. In philosophy and economics 
 he was a Utilitarian of the school of J. S. 
 Mill, and in politics what used to be called a 
 philosophical Radical, a Radical of the less 
 extreme type, free from sentiment and from 
 prejudices, but equally free from any desire to 
 destroy for the sake of destroying. Like the 
 other Utilitarians of those days, he was a 
 moderate optimist, expecting the world to grow 
 better steadily, though not swiftly ; and he went 
 to America in the belief that he should there find
 
 E. L. Godkin 367 
 
 more progress secured, and more of further pro- 
 gress in prospect, than any European country 
 could show. It was the land of promise, in 
 which all the forces making for good on which 
 the school of Mill relied were to be found at 
 work, hampered only by the presence of slavery. 
 I note this fact, because it shows that the pessi- 
 mism of Mr. Godkin's later years was not due to a 
 naturally querulous or despondent temperament. 
 
 So too was his mind admirably fitted for the 
 career he had chosen. It was logical, penetrat- 
 ing, systematic, yet it was also quick and 
 nimble. His views were definite, not to say 
 dogmatic, and as they were confidently held, 
 so too they were confidently expressed. He 
 never struck a doubtful note. He never slurred 
 over a difficulty, nor sought, when he knew 
 himself ignorant, to cover up his ignorance. 
 Imagination was kept well in hand, for his con- 
 stant aim was to Q^et at and deal with the vital 
 facts of every case. If he was not original in the 
 way of thinking out doctrines distinctivelv his 
 own, nor in respect of any exuberance of ideas 
 bubbling up in the course of discussion, there was 
 fertilit)' as well as freshn(;ss in his application of 
 principles to current questions, and in th(; illustra- 
 tions by which he enforced his arguments. 
 
 As his thinking was exact, so his style was 
 clear-cut and trenchant. Even when he was 
 writing most swiftly, it never sank below a high
 
 368 Biographical Studies 
 
 level of form and finish. Every word had its 
 use and every sentence told. There was no 
 doubt about his meaning, and just as little about 
 the strength of his convictions. He had a gift 
 for terse vivacious paragraphs commenting on 
 some event of the day or summing up the effect of 
 a speech or a debate. The touch was equally 
 light and firm. But if the manner was brisk, the 
 matter was solid : you admired the keenness of 
 the insight and the weight of the judgment just 
 as much as the brightness of the style. Much 
 of the brightness lay in the humour. That is a 
 plant which blossoms so much more profusely on 
 Transatlantic soil that English readers of the 
 Nation had usually a start of surprise when told 
 that this most humorous of American journalists 
 was not an American at all but a European, 
 and indeed a European who never became 
 thoroughly Americanised. It was humour of 
 a pungent and sarcastic quality, usually directed 
 to the detection of tricks or the exposure of 
 shams, but it was eminently mirth-provoking and 
 never malicious. Frequently it was ironical, and 
 the irony sometimes so fine as to be mistaken 
 for seriousness. 
 
 The Nation was from its very first numbers 
 so full of force, keenness, and knowledge, and so 
 unusually well written, that it made its way rapidly 
 amone the educated classes of the Eastern States. 
 It soon became a power, but a power of a new
 
 E. L. Godkin 369 
 
 kind. Mr. Godkin wanted most of the talents 
 or interests of the ordinary journalist. He 
 gave no thought to the organisation of the 
 paper as a business undertaking. He scarcely 
 heeded circulation, either when his livelihood 
 depended upon the N'ation of which he was the 
 chief owner, or when he was associated with 
 others in the ownership of the Evciiiug Post. 
 He refused to allow any news he disapproved, 
 including all scandal and all society gossip, to 
 appear. He was prepared at any moment to 
 incur unpopularity from his subscribers, or even 
 to offend one half of his advertisers. He took 
 no pains to get news before other journals, and 
 cared nothing for those "beats" and "scoops" in 
 which the soul of the normal newspaper man 
 finds a legitimate source of pride. He was not 
 there, he would have said, to please either ad- 
 vertisers or subscribers, but to tell the American 
 people the truths they needed to hear, and if 
 those truths were distasteful, so much the more 
 needful was it to proclaim them. He was abso- 
 lutely independent not only of all personal but 
 ot all party ties. A public man was never 
 either praised or sufiered to escape censure be- 
 cause he was a private acquaintance. He once 
 told me that the being obliged to censure those 
 with whom he stood in personal relations was 
 the least agreeable feature of his profession. 
 
 Whether an act was done by the Republicans 
 
 2 r.
 
 370 Biographical Studies 
 
 or by the Democrats made no difference to his 
 judgment, or to the severity with which his 
 judgment was expressed. His distrust of Mr. 
 James G. Blaine had led him to support Mr. 
 Cleveland at the election of 1884, and he con- 
 tinued to give a general approval to the latter 
 statesman during both his presidential terms. But 
 when Mr. Cleveland's Venezuelan message with 
 its menaces to England appeared in December 
 1895, Mr. Godkin vehemently denounced it, as 
 indeed he had frequently before blamed particular 
 acts of the Cleveland administrations. He some- 
 times voted for the Republicans, sometimes for 
 the Democrats, according to the merits of the 
 transitory issue or the particular candidate, but 
 after 1884 no one could have called him either a 
 Republican or a Democrat. 
 
 Independence of party is less rare among 
 American than among European newspapers ; 
 but courage such as Godkin's is rare every- 
 where. The editor of a century ago had in most 
 countries to fear press censorship, or the law of 
 political libel, or the frowns of the great. The 
 modern editor, delivered from these risks, is 
 exposed to the more insidious temptations of 
 financial influence, of social pressure, of the 
 fear of injuring the business interests of the 
 paper, which are now sometimes enormous. 
 Godkin's conscientiousness and pride made him 
 equally indifferent to influence and to threats. As
 
 E. L. Godkin 371 
 
 some one said, you might as well have tried to 
 frighten the east wind. Clear, prompt, and self- 
 confident, judging everything by a high standard 
 of honour and public spirit, he distributed censure 
 with no regard either to the official position 
 or to the party affiliations of politicians. The 
 "Weekly Day of Judgment" was the title 
 bestowed upon the Nation by Charles Dudley 
 Warner, who himself admired it. As Godkin 
 expected or at least demanded righteousness 
 from every one, he was more a terror to evil- 
 doers than a praise to them that do well, and 
 the fact that, having no private ends to serve, 
 he thought only of truth and the public interest, 
 made him all the more stringent. Because 
 he was, and found it easy to be, fearless and in- 
 dependent, he scarcely allowed enough for the 
 timidity of others, and sometimes chastised the 
 weak as sternly as the wicked. An editor who 
 smites all the self-seekers and all the time-servers 
 whom he thinks worth smiting, is sure to be- 
 come a target for many arrows. But as Godkin 
 w^as an equally caustic critic of the sentimental 
 vagaries or economic heresies of well-meaning 
 men or sections of oj)inion, he incurred hostility 
 from quarters where the desire for honest adminis- 
 tration and the purity of public life was hardly 
 less strong than in the pages of the A^ at ion itself 
 Though he took no personal part in politics, never 
 appeared on platforms nor in any way put himself
 
 372 Biographical Studies 
 
 forward, his paper was so markedly himself that 
 people talked of it as him. It was not "the 
 Nation says " or " the Post says," but " Godkin 
 says." Even his foreign birth was charged 
 against him a rare charge in a country so 
 tolerant and catholic as the United States, where 
 every office except that of President is open to 
 newcomers as freely as to the native born. 
 
 He was called "un-American," and I have 
 heard men who admired and read the Nation 
 nevertheless complain that they did not want 
 "to be taught by a European how to run this 
 Republic." True it is that he did not see things 
 or write about them quite as an American would 
 have done. But was this altogether a misfortune? 
 The Italian cities of the Middle Ages used to call 
 in a man of character and mark from some other 
 place and make him Podesta just because he stood 
 outside the family ties and the factions of the 
 city. Godkin's foreign education gave him de- 
 tachment and perspective. It never reduced his 
 ardour to see administration and public life in 
 America made worthy of the greatness of the 
 American people. 
 
 No journal could have maintained its circula- 
 tion and extended its influence in the face of so 
 much hostility except by commanding merits. 
 The merits of the Nation were incontestable. 
 It was the best weekly not only in America 
 but in the world. The editorials were models
 
 E. L. Godkin 373 
 
 of style. The book reviews, many of them 
 in earlier days also written by Godkin himself, 
 were finished in point of form, and, when not 
 his own, came from the ablest specialist hands 
 in the country. The " current notes " of progress 
 in such subjects as geography, natural history, 
 and archaeology were instructive and accurate. 
 So it was that people had to read the iVa/ion 
 whether they liked it or not. It could not be 
 ignored. It was a necessity even where it was a 
 terror. 
 
 Yet neither the force of his reasoning nor 
 the brilliance of his style would have secured 
 Godkin's influence but for two other elements of 
 strength he possessed. One was the universal 
 belief in his disinterestedness and sincerity. 
 He was often charged with prejudice or bitter- 
 ness, but never with any sinister motive ; enemies 
 no less than friends resjjected him. The 
 other was his humour. An austere moralist 
 who is brimful of fun is rare in any country. 
 Relishing humour more than does any other 
 j)eople, the Americans could not be seriously 
 angry with a man who gave them so abundant a 
 feast. 
 
 To trace the course he took in the politics of 
 the United States since 1S60 would almost be 
 to outline the history of forty years, for then; 
 was no great issue in the discussion ot which 
 he did not bear a part. He was a strong
 
 374 Biographical Studies 
 
 supporter of the Northern cause during the War 
 of Secession, and by his letters to the London 
 Daily News did something to enlighten English 
 readers. When the problems of reconstruction 
 emerged after the war, he suggested lines of 
 action more moderate than those followed by 
 the Republican leaders, and during many subse- 
 quent years denounced the "carpet-baggers," and 
 advocated the policy of restoring self-govern- 
 ment to the Southern States and withdrawing 
 Federal troops. Incensed at the corruption of 
 some of the men who surrounded President 
 Grant during his first term, he opposed Grant's 
 re-election, as did nearly all the reformers of 
 those days. By this time he had begun to attack 
 the "spoils system," and to demand a reform of 
 the civil service, and he had also become engaged 
 in that campaign against the Tammany organisa- 
 tion in New York City which he maintained 
 with unabated eneigy till the end of his editorial 
 career.^ In 1884 he led the opposition to the 
 candidacy of Mr. Blaine for President, and it was 
 mainly the persistency with which the Evening 
 Post set forth the accusations brought against 
 that statesman that secured his defeat in New 
 York State, and therewith his defeat in the 
 election. It was on this occasion that the nick- 
 
 ^ The Tammany leaders had him repeatedly arrested, once on a 
 Sunday morning (that being the day on which it was least easy to tind 
 bail) for alleged criminal libels upon them. These prosecutions, threatened 
 in the hope of intimidating him, never went further.
 
 E. L. Godkin 375 
 
 name of Mugwump^ was first applied to Mr. 
 Godkin by the ablest of his antagonists in the 
 press, Mr. Dana of the New York Sun, a title 
 before long extended to the Independents whom 
 the Post led, and who constituted, during the 
 next ten or twelve years, a section of opinion 
 important, if not by its numbers, yet by the 
 intellectual and moral weight of the men who 
 composed it. When currency questions became 
 prominent, Mr. Godkin was a strong opponent 
 of bimetallism and of " silverism " in all its 
 forms, and a not less strenuous opponent of all 
 socialistic theories and movements. It need 
 hardly be added that he had always been an 
 upholder of the principles ot Free Trade. Like 
 a sound Cobdenite, he was an advocate of 
 peace, and disliked territorial extension. He 
 opposed President Grant's scheme tor the acqui- 
 sition of San Domingo, as he afterwards opposed 
 the annexation of Hawaii. His close study of 
 Irish history, and his old faith in the principle of 
 nationality, had made him a strenuous acUocate ot 
 Home Rule for Ireland. But no one was tarther 
 than he from sharing the feelings of the Ameri- 
 can Irish towards England. He condemned the 
 threats addressed in 1S95 to Great Ikitain over 
 the Venezuela question ; and glad as he was 10 
 
 ' A Mul;\vuiii[) is in the Al,L;'>n<juia tonL;ut; p.n ni;c'l cl;icl .^r u.^c n'..iii, 
 and the name was meant to ri.iiculc tlie cv i\-.cki\ii\: manner ascri' d t > 
 the Evenitii: Post.
 
 376 Biographical Studies 
 
 see that question settled by England's accept- 
 ance of an arbitration which she had previously 
 denied the right of the United States to 
 demand, he held that England must beware of 
 yielding too readily to pressure from the United 
 States, because such compliance would encourage 
 that aggressive spirit in the latter whose con- 
 sequences for both countries he feared. Never, 
 perhaps, did he incur so much obloquy as in 
 defending, almost single-handed, the British posi- 
 tion in the Venezuelan affair. The attacks made 
 all over the country on the Evening Post were, 
 he used to say, like storms of hail lashing against 
 his windows. At the very end of his career, he 
 resisted the war with Spain and the annexation 
 of the Philippine Islands, deeming the acquisi- 
 tion of trans- Oceanic territories, inhabited by 
 inferior races, a dangerous new departure, opposed 
 to the traditions of the Fathers of the Republic, 
 and inconsistent with the principles on which the 
 Republic was founded. No public writer has left 
 a more consistent record. 
 
 In private life Mr. Godkin was a faithful 
 friend and a charming companion, genial as well 
 as witty, considerate of others, and liked no less 
 than admired by his staff on \}[\& Evening Post, with 
 a deep-lying vein of sentiment which he seldom 
 suffered to appear, free from cynicism, and more 
 indulgent in his views of human nature than might 
 have been gathered from his public utterances. He
 
 E. L. Godkin 377 
 
 never despaired of democratic government, yet his 
 spirits had been damped by the faint fulfilment 
 of those hopes for the progress of free nations, 
 and especially of the United States, which 
 had illumined his youth. The slow advance 
 of economic truths, the evils produced by 
 the increase of wealth, the Qrrowth of what he 
 called "chromo-civilisation," the indifference of 
 the rich and educated to politics, the want of 
 nerve among politicians, the excitability of the 
 masses, the tenacity with which corruption and 
 misgovernment held their ground, in spite of 
 repeated exposures, in cities like New York, 
 Philadelphia, and Chicago all these things had 
 so sunk into his soul that it became hard to in- 
 duce him to look at the other side, and to appre- 
 ciate the splendid recuperative forces which are 
 at work in America. Thus his friends were 
 driven to that melancholy form of comfort which 
 consists in pointing out that other countries are 
 no better. They argued that Kngkmd in par- 
 ticular, to which he had continued to look as the 
 home of political morality and enlightened State 
 wisdom, was suffering from evils, not inde(;d the 
 same as those which in his judgment altlicted 
 America, but equally serious. They batle him 
 reniember that moral progress is not continuous, 
 but subject to ebbs of reaction, and that America 
 is a country of which one should never despair, 
 because in it evils have often before worked out
 
 37^ Biographical Studies 
 
 their cure. He did regretfully own, after his 
 latest visits to Europe, that England had sadly- 
 declined from the England of his earlier days, 
 and he admitted that the clouds under which his 
 own path had latterly lain might after a time be 
 scattered by a burst of sunshine ; but his hopes for 
 the near future of America were not brightened by 
 these reflections. Sometimes he seemed to feel 
 though of his own work he never spoke as 
 though he had laboured in vain for forty years. 
 
 If he so thought, he did his work far less than 
 justice. It had told powerfully upon the United 
 States, and that in more than one way. Though 
 the circulation of the Nation was never large, it 
 was read by the two classes which in America have 
 most to do with forming political and economic 
 opinion I mean editors and University teachers. 
 (The Universities and Colleges, be it remembered, 
 are far more numerous, relatively to the popula- 
 tion, in America than in England, and a more 
 important factor in the thought of the country.) 
 From the editors and the professors Mr. Godkin's 
 views filtered down into the educated class gener- 
 ally, and affected its opinion. He instructed and 
 stimulated the men who instructed and stimu- 
 lated the rest of the people. To those young men 
 in particular who thought about public affairs and 
 were preparing themselves to serve their country, 
 his articles were an inspiration. The great hope 
 for American democracy to-day lies in the growing
 
 E. L. Godkin 379 
 
 zeal and the ripened intelligence with which the 
 generation now come to manhood has begun to 
 throw itself into public work. Many influences 
 have contributed to this result, and Mr. Godkin's 
 has been among the most potent. 
 
 Nor was his example less beneficial to the 
 profession of journalism. There has always 
 been a profusion of talent in the American press, 
 talent more alert and versatile than is to be found 
 in the press of any European country. But in 
 1865 there were three things which the United 
 States lacked. Literary criticism did not maintain 
 a high standard, nor duly distinguish thorough from 
 flashy or superficial performances. Part)' spirit was 
 so strong and so pervasive that journalists were 
 content to denounce or to extol, and seldom sub- 
 jected the character of men or measures to a 
 searching and impartial examination. There was 
 too much sentimentalism in politics, with too little 
 reference of current questions to underlying prin- 
 ciples, too little effort to get down to what Ameri- 
 cans call the "hard pan" of facts. In all these 
 respects the last forty years have witnessed pro- 
 digious advances ; and, so far as the press is 
 concerned for much has been due to the Uni- 
 versities and to the growth of a literary class 
 Mr. Godkin's writings largely contributed to the 
 progress made. His finished criticism, his exact 
 method, his incisive handling of economic prob- 
 lems, his complete detachment from [)arty. helped
 
 380 Biographical Studies 
 
 to form a new school of journalists, as the example 
 he set of a serious and lofty conception of an editor's 
 duties helped to add dignity to the position. He 
 had not that disposition to enthrone the press 
 which made a great English newspaper once claim 
 for itself that it discharged in the modern world the 
 functions of the mediseval Church. But he brought 
 to his work as an anonymous writer a sense of re- 
 sponsibility and a zeal for the welfare of his country 
 which no minister of State could have surpassed. 
 
 His friends may sometimes have wished that 
 he had more fully recognised the worth of senti- 
 ment as a motive power in politics, that he had 
 more frequently tried to persuade as well as to con- 
 vince, that he had given more credit for partial 
 instalments of honest service and for a virtue less 
 than perfect, that he had dealt more leniently 
 with the faults of the good and the follies of the 
 wise. Defects in these respects were the almost 
 inevitable defects of his admirable qualities, of 
 his passion for truth, his hatred of wrong and 
 injustice, his clear vision, his indomitable spirit. 
 
 The lesson of his editorial career is a lesson 
 not for America only. Among the dangers that 
 beset democratic communities, none are greater 
 than the efforts of wealth to control, not only 
 electors and legislators, but also the organs of 
 public opinion, and the disposition of statesmen 
 and journalists to defer to and flatter the majority, 
 adopting the sentiment dominant at the moment,
 
 E. L. Godkin 381 
 
 and telling the people that its voice is the voice 
 of God. Mr. Godkin was not only inaccessible 
 to the lures of wealth the same may hap{)ily be 
 still said of many of his craft-brethren he was 
 just as little accessible to the fear of popular 
 displeasure. Nothing more incensed him than 
 to see a statesman or an editor with his "ear to 
 the ground " (to use an American phrase), seeking 
 to catch the sound of the coming crowd. To 
 him, the less popular a view was, so much the 
 more did it need to be well weighed and, if 
 approved, to be strenuously and incessantly 
 preached. Democracies will always have dema- 
 gogues ready to feed their vanity and stir their 
 passions and exaggerate the feeling of the 
 moment. What they need is men who will swim 
 against the stream, will tell them their faults, will 
 urge an argument all the more forcibly because it 
 is unwelcome. Such an one was Edwin Godkin. 
 Since the death of Abraham Lincoln, America 
 has been generally more influenced by her writers. 
 preachers, and thinkers than by her statesmen. 
 In the list of those who have during the last forty 
 years influenced her for good and hel[ied l)y their 
 pens to make her history, a list illustrated by such 
 names as those of R. W . Emerson and Phillips 
 Brooks and James Russell Lowell, his name 
 will find its place and receive its well-earned 
 meed of honour.
 
 LORD ACTON 
 
 When Lord Acton died on 19th June 1902, at 
 Tegern See in Bavaria, England lost the most truly- 
 cosmopolitan of her children, and Europe lost one 
 who was, by universal consent, in the foremost rank 
 of her men of learning. He belonged to an old 
 Roman Catholic family of Shropshire, a branch 
 of which had gone to Southern Italy, where his 
 grandfather. General Acton, had been chief 
 minister of the King of Naples in the great 
 war, at the time when the Bourbon dynasty 
 maintained itself in Sicily by the help of 
 the British fleet, while all Italy lay under the 
 heel of Napoleon. His father. Sir Ferdinand 
 Acton, married a German lady^ heiress of the 
 ancient and famous house of Dalberg, one of the 
 great families of the middle Rhineland ; so John 
 Edward Emerich Dalberg-Acton was born half a 
 German, and connected by blood with the highest 
 aristocracy of Germany. He was educated at 
 Oscott, one of the two chief Roman Catholic 
 colleges of England, under Dr. Wiseman, after- 
 wards Archbishop of Westminster and Cardinal ; 
 
 but the most powerful influence on the develop- 
 
 382
 
 Lord Acton 383 
 
 merit of his mind and principles came from 
 tiiat orlorv of Catholic learninp-, a beautiful 
 soul as well as a capacious intellect, Dr. von 
 Dollinger, with whom Acton studied durin^^ some 
 years at Munich. He sat for a short time in 
 the House of Commons as member for Carlow 
 (1859); and was afterwards elected for Bridg- 
 north (1865), but lost his seat (which he had 
 gained by one vote only) on a scrutiny. In 
 those days it was not easy for a Roman Catholic 
 to find an English constituency, so in 1S69 Mr. 
 Gladstone procured his elevation to the peer- 
 age. He made a successful speech in the House 
 of Lords in 1893, but took no prominent part in 
 parliamentary life in either House, feeling himself 
 too much of a student, and looking at current 
 questions from a point of view unlike that of 
 English politicians. Neither as a philosopher, 
 nor as a historian, nor as a product of German 
 training, could he find eitlier Lords or Commons 
 a congenial audience. When he was asked soon 
 after he entered Parliament why he did not speak, 
 he answered that heagreed with nobody and nobody 
 agreed with him. But since he regarded politics as 
 history in the course of making under his eyes, he 
 continued to be all his life keenly interested in 
 public affairs, watching and judging every move 
 in the frame. Mr. Gladstone, whose trusted 
 friend he had been for many years, was b(?lieved 
 to have on one occasion wished to place him in an
 
 384 Biographical Studies 
 
 important office ; but political exigencies made 
 this impossible, and the only public post he ever 
 held was that of Lord-in-Waiting in the Ministry 
 of 1892. In this capacity he was brought into 
 frequent contact with Queen Victoria, who felt 
 the warmest respect and admiration for him. He 
 was one of the very few persons surrounding her 
 who was familiar with most of the courts of Con- 
 tinental Europe, and could discuss with her from 
 direct knowledge the men who figured in those 
 courts. At Windsor he spent in the library of 
 the Castle all the time during which he was not 
 required to be in actual attendance on the Queen, 
 a singular phenomenon among Lords-in-Waiting. 
 Unlike most English Roman Catholics, he was 
 a strong Liberal, a Liberal of that orthodox type, 
 individualist, free-trade, and peace-loving, which 
 prevailed from 1846 till 1885. He was also a 
 convinced Home Ruler, and had, indeed, adopted 
 the principle of Home Rule for Ireland long 
 before Mr. Gladstone himself was converted to it. 
 His faith in that principle rested on the value he 
 attached to self-government as a means of train- 
 ing and developing the political aptitudes of a 
 people, and to the recognition of national senti- 
 ment, which he held to be, like other natural forces, 
 useful when guided but formidable when repressed. 
 So too his Liberalism was based on the love of 
 freedom for its own sake, joined to the convic- 
 tion that freedom is the best foundation for the
 
 Lord Acton 385 
 
 stability of a constitution and the happiness of 
 a people. Rehance on the power of freedom 
 was, he used to say, one of the broadest of all the 
 lessons he had learned from history. He applied 
 it in ecclesiastical as well as in political affairs. 
 At the time of the Vatican Council of 1870 he 
 was, though a layman, prominent among those 
 who constituted the opposition maintained by the 
 Liberal section of the Roman Catholic Churcli 
 to the affirmation of the dogma of papal in- 
 fallibility. His full and accurate knowledge of 
 ecclesiastical history was placed at the disposal of 
 the prelates, such as Bishop Dupanloup, Bishop 
 Strossmayer, and xA-rchbishop Conolly (of Halifax, 
 Nova Scotia), who combated the Ultramontane 
 party in the animated and protracted debates 
 which illumined that G^^cumenical Council. One, 
 at least, of the treatises, and many of the letters 
 in the press which the Council called forth were 
 WTitten either by him or from niaterials which he 
 supplied, and he was recognised by the; lUtra- 
 montanes, and in particular l)y Archbishop Man- 
 ning, as being, along with Dollinger, the nn)sL 
 formidable of their opponents behind the scenes. 
 As every one knows, the Infallibilists trium[)hed, 
 and the schism which led to the formation ot the 
 Old Catholic Church in Germany and Switzer- 
 land was the result. Dollinger was e.xcommuni- 
 cated ; but against Lord Acton no action was 
 
 taken, and he remained all his life a taithful 
 
 2 c
 
 386 Biographical Studies 
 
 member of the Roman communion, while adher- 
 ing to the views he had advocated in 1870. 
 
 With this close hold upon practical life and 
 this constant interest in the politics of the world, 
 especially of England and the United States, no 
 one could be less like that cloistered student who 
 is commonly taken as the typical man of learning. 
 But Lord Acton was a miracle of learning. Of 
 the sciences of nature and their practical applica- 
 tions in the arts he had indeed no more know- 
 ledge than any cultivated man of the world is 
 expected to possess. But of all the so-called 
 "human subjects" his mastery was unequalled. 
 Learning was the business of his life. He was 
 gifted with a singularly tenacious memory. His 
 industry was untiring. Wherever he was in 
 London, at Cannes in winter, at Tegern See in 
 summer, at Windsor or Osborne with the Queen, 
 latterly (till his health failed) at Cambridge dur- 
 ing the University terms he never worked less 
 than eight hours a day. Yet, even after making 
 every allowance for his memory and his industry, 
 his friends stood amazed at the range and exact- 
 ness of his knowledge. It was as various as it was 
 profound, and much of it bore on recondite matters 
 which few men study to-day. Though less minute 
 where it touched the ancient and the early medi- 
 aeval world than as respected more recent times, 
 it might be said to cover the whole field of history, 
 both civil and ecclesiastical, and became wonderfully
 
 Lord Acton 387 
 
 full and exact when it reached the Renaissance and 
 Reformation periods. It included not only the 
 older theology, but modern Biblical criticism. It 
 included metaphysics ; and not only meta{)hysics in 
 the more special sense, but the abstract side of 
 economics and that philosophy of law on which 
 the Germans set so much store. Most of the 
 prominent figures who have during the last 
 half-century led the march of inquiry in these 
 subjects, men like Ranke and Fustel de 
 Coulanges in history, Wilhelm Roscher in 
 economic science, Adolf Harnack in theology, 
 were his personal friends, and he could meet 
 them as an equal on their own ground. On 
 one occasion I had invited to meet him at dinner 
 the late Dr. (afterwards Bishop) Creighton. who 
 was then writing his History of the Popes, and the 
 late Professor Robertson Smith, the most eminent 
 Hebrew and Arabic scholar in liritain. The con- 
 versation turned tirst u[)()n tht; timt's of Pope Peo 
 the Tenth, and then upon recent controversies 
 reoardino- the dates ot the books of the Old 
 Testament, and it soon appearetl that Pord 
 Acton knew as much about \k\v. former as I )r. 
 Creighton, and as nuich about \.\\c. latter as 
 Robertson Smith. The constitutional histor\- of 
 the United States is a topic tar remoxcd Irom 
 those philosophical and ecclesiastical or theologi- 
 cal lines of inquiry to which most ol his time: had 
 been given ; yet he knew it more tht)roughly than
 
 388 Biographical Studies 
 
 any other living European, at least in England 
 and France, for of the Germans I will not venture 
 to speak, and he continued to read most of the 
 books of importance dealing with it which from 
 time to time were published. So, indeed, he 
 kept abreast of nearly all the literature of possible 
 utility bearing on history (especially ecclesiastical 
 history) and political theory that appeared in 
 Europe or America, reading much which his less 
 diligent or less eager friends thought scarcely 
 worthy of his perusal. And it need hardly be 
 said that his friends found him an invaluable guide 
 to the literature of any subject. In the sphere 
 of history more especially, one might safely 
 assume that a book which he did not know was 
 not worth knowing, while he was often able to 
 indicate, as being the right book to consult, some 
 work of which the person who consulted him, 
 albeit not unversed in the subject, had never 
 heard. He had at one time four libraries, the 
 largest at his family seat, Aldenham in Shrop- 
 shire, others at Tegern See, at Cannes, and in 
 London ; and he could usually tell in which of 
 these the particular book he named was to be 
 found. Unlike most men who value their 
 libraries, he was fond of lending books, and 
 would sometimes put a friend to shame by asking 
 some weeks afterwards what the latter thought 
 of the volumes he had almost forced on the 
 borrower, and which the borrower had not found
 
 Lord Acton 389 
 
 time to read. After sayini^ this, I need scarcely 
 add that he was not a book collector in the usual 
 sense of the word. He did not care for rare 
 editions, and still less did he care about bindings. 
 
 His Aldenham library was itself a nionument 
 of learning and industry.^ In forming it he sought 
 to bring together the books needed for tracing 
 and elucidating the growth of formative ideas 
 and of institutions in the sphere of ecclesiastical 
 and civil polity, and to attain this he made it 
 include not only all the best treatises handling 
 these large and complex subjects, but a mass of 
 original records bearing as well on the local 
 histories of the cities and provinces of such 
 countries as Italy and France as on the general 
 history of the great European States and of the 
 Church. This magnificent design he accomplished 
 by his own efforts before he was forty. What was 
 still more surprising, he had found time to use the 
 books. Nearly all of them show by notes pencilled 
 or marks placed in them that he had read some 
 part of them, and knew (so far as was needed for 
 his purpose) their contents. 
 
 Vast as his stores of knowledge were, they 
 were opened only to his few intimate friends. 
 It was not merely that he, as Tennyson said of 
 Edmund Lushinofton, "bore all that weii^ht of 
 learning lightly, like a llower." No one could 
 
 ' This library, hovighi !iy Mr. Amiiuw l/arnc-ie, was i>rcscii;cii hy luiii 
 to Mr. T"hn Morley, and by tlie laUi.'r to the Univ'.-r^ity iT (.'.imVridL'c.
 
 390 Biographical Studies 
 
 have known in general society that he had any 
 weight of learning to bear. He seemed to be 
 merely a cultivated and agreeable man of the 
 world, interested in letters and politics, but dis- 
 posed rather to listen than to talk. He was 
 sometimes enigmatic and " not incapable of cast- 
 ing a pearl of irony in the way of those who would 
 mistake it for pebbly fact."^ A great capacity 
 for cynicism remained a capacity only, because 
 joined to a greater reverence for virtue. In a 
 large company he seldom put forth the ful- 
 ness of his powers ; it was in familiar converse 
 with persons whose tastes resembled his own 
 that the extraordinary finesse and polish of his 
 mind revealed themselves. His critical taste was 
 not only delicate, but exacting ; his judgments 
 leaned to the side of severity. No one applied 
 a more stringent moral standard to the conduct 
 of men in public affairs, whether to-day or in 
 past ages. He insisted upon this, in his inaugural 
 lecture at Cambridge, as the historian's first duty. 
 " It is," said he, " the office of historical science to 
 maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion 
 of men and things." When he came to estimate 
 the value of literary work he seemed no less 
 hard to satisfy. His ideal, both as respected 
 thoroughness in substance and finish in form, 
 was impossibly high, and he noted every failure 
 to reach it. No one appreciated merit more 
 
 ^ The phrase is Professor Maitland's.
 
 Lord Acton 391 
 
 cordially. No one spoke with warmer admiration 
 of such distinguished historians and theologians 
 as the men whom I have just named. But the 
 precision of his thinking and the fistidiousness 
 of his taste gave more than a tinge of austerity 
 to his judgment. His opinions were peculiarly 
 instructive and illuminative to Englishmen, be- 
 cause he was only half an Englishman in blood, 
 less than half an Englishman in his training and 
 mental habits. He was as much at home in Paris 
 or Berlin or Rome as he was in London, speak- 
 ing the four great languages with almost equal 
 facility, and knowing the men who in each of these 
 capitals were best worth knowing. He viewed 
 our insular literature and politics with the de- 
 tachment not only of a Roman Catholic among 
 Protestants, of a pupil of DtJllinger and Roscher 
 amoncf Oxford and Cambridofc men, but also of 
 a citizen of the world, whose mastery of history 
 and philosophy had given him an unusually wide 
 outlook over mankind at large. 
 
 His interest in the great things, so far from 
 turning him away from the small things, seemed 
 to quicken his sense of their significance. It was 
 a noteworthy feature of his view of history that 
 he should have held that the explanation of most 
 of what has passed in the light is to be found in 
 what has passed in the dark. He was always 
 hunting for the key to secret chambers, preferring 
 to believe that the grand staircase is only for show,
 
 392 Biographical Studies 
 
 and meant to impose upon the multitude, while the 
 real action goes on in hidden passages behind. No 
 one knew so much of the gossip of the past ; no 
 one was more intensely curious about the gossip 
 of the present, though in his hands it ceased 
 to be gossip and became unwritten history. One 
 was sometimes disposed to wonder whether he did 
 not think too much about the backstairs. But he 
 had seen a great deal of history in the making. 
 
 The passion for acquiring knowledge which 
 his German education had fostered ended by 
 becoming a snare to him, because it checked his 
 productive powers. Not that learning burdened 
 him, or clogged the soaring pinions of his mind. 
 He was master of all he knew. But acquisition 
 absorbed so much of his time that little was left 
 for literary composition. (Dollinger saw the 
 danger, for he observed that if Acton did not 
 write a great book before he reached the age 
 of forty, he would never do so.) It made him 
 think that he could not write on a subject till 
 he had read everything, or nearly everything, 
 that others had written about it. It developed 
 the habit of making extracts from the books he 
 read, a habit which took the form of accumu- 
 lating small slips of paper on which these 
 extracts were written in his exquisitely neat and 
 regular hand, the slips being arranged in card- 
 board boxes according to their subjects. He 
 had hundreds of these boxes ; and though much
 
 Lord Acton 393 
 
 of their contents must no doubt be valuable, the 
 time spent in distilling and bottling the essence 
 of the books whence they came, might have been 
 better spent in giving to the world the ideas 
 which they had helped to evoke in his own mind. 
 If one may take the quotations appended to 
 his inaugural lecture as a sample of those he 
 had collected, many of them were not excej)- 
 tionally valuable, and did little more than show 
 how the same idea, perhaps no recondite one. 
 might be expressed in different words by different 
 persons. When one read some article he had 
 written, garnished and even overloaded with 
 citations, one often felt that his own part was 
 better, both in substance and in form, than the 
 passages which he had culled from his prede- 
 cessors. It becomes daily more than ever true 
 that the secret of historical composition is to 
 know what to neglect, since in our time it has 
 become impossible to exhaust the literature of 
 most subjects, and, as respects the last two 
 centuries, to exhaust even the oricjinal authorities. 
 Yet how shall one know what to neglect without 
 at least a glance of inspection ? Acton was im- 
 willing to neglect anything; and his ardour lor com- 
 pleteness drew him into a policy lit only ior one 
 who could expect to live three lives of mortal nu-n. 
 The love of knowledge grew upon him till 
 it became a passion of the intellect, a thirst like 
 the thirst for water in a parching desert. What
 
 394 Biographical Studies 
 
 he sought to know was not facts only, but facts 
 in their relations to principles, facts so disposed 
 and fitly joined together as to become the cause- 
 way over which the road to truth shall pass. 
 For this purpose events were in his view not 
 more important than the thoughts of men, because 
 discursive and creative thought was to him the 
 ruling factor in history. Hence books must be 
 known books of philosophic creation, books of 
 philosophic reflection, no less than those which 
 record what has happened. The danger of this 
 conception is that everything men have said or 
 written, as well as everything they have done, 
 becomes a possibly significant fact ; and thus the 
 search for truth becomes endless because the 
 materials are inexhaustible. 
 
 He expressed in striking words, prefixed to 
 a list of books suggested for a young man's 
 perusal, his view of the aim of a course of 
 historical reading. It is "to give force and 
 fulness and clearness and sincerity and independ- 
 ence and elevation and generosity and serenity 
 to his mind, that he may know the method and 
 law of the process by which error is conquered 
 and truth is won, discerning knowledge from 
 probability and prejudice from belief, that he 
 may learn to master what he rejects as fully as 
 what he adopts, that he may understand the 
 origin as well as the strength and vitality of 
 systems and the better motive of men who are
 
 Lord Acton 395 
 
 wrong . . . and to steel him against the charm 
 of Hterary beauty and talent."^ 
 
 Neither his passion for facts nor his apprecia- 
 tion of style and form made him decline to the 
 right hand or to the left from the true position 
 of a historian. He set little store upon what is 
 called literary excellence, and would often reply, 
 when questioned as to the merits of some book 
 bearing an eminent name, " You need not read 
 it : it adds nothing to what we knew." He valued 
 facts only so far as they went to establish a principle 
 or explained the course of events. It was really 
 not so much in the range of his knowledge as in 
 the profundity and precision of his thought that 
 his greatness lay. 
 
 His somewhat overstrained conscientiousness, 
 coupled with the practically unattainable ideal of 
 finish and form which he set before himself, made 
 him less and less disposed to literary production. 
 No man of first-rate powers has in our time left 
 so little by which posterity may judge those 
 powers. In his early life, when for a time he 
 edited the Home and Forcii^ii Rcvieiv, and wh(!n 
 he was connected with the Rauiblcr and the 
 North British Reviezu, he wrote frequently; and 
 even between 1868 and 1890 he contributed 
 to the press some few historical essays and a 
 number of anonymous letters. But the aversion 
 
 1 I owe this quotation to a letter of Sir M. E. C'.rant Duff's published 
 soon after Lord Acton's death.
 
 39^ Biographical Studies 
 
 to creative work seemed to grow on him. About 
 1890 he so far yielded to the urgency of a few 
 friends as to promise to reissue a number of his 
 essays in a volume, but, after rewriting and polish- 
 ing these essays during several years, he aban- 
 doned the scheme altogether. In 1882 he had 
 already drawn out a plan for a comprehensive 
 history of Liberty. But this plan also he 
 dropped, because the more he read with a view 
 to undertaking it the more he wished to read, 
 and the vaster did the enterprise seem to loom up 
 before him. With him, as with many men who 
 cherish high literary ideals, the Better proved 
 to be the enemy of the Good. 
 
 Twenty years ago, late at night, in his library 
 at Cannes, he expounded to me his view of how 
 such a history of Liberty might be written, and 
 in what wise it might be made the central thread 
 of all history. He spoke for six or seven minutes 
 only ; but he spoke like a man inspired, seeming 
 as if, from some mountain summit high in air, he 
 saw beneath him the far-winding path of human 
 progress from dim Cimmerian shores of pre- 
 historic shadow into the fuller yet broken and 
 fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence 
 was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was 
 the penetrating vision which discerned through 
 all events and in all ages the play of those moral 
 forces, now creating, now destroying, always 
 transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded
 
 Lord Acton 397 
 
 institutions, and had given to the liunian spirit 
 its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was 
 as if the whole landscape of history had been 
 suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight. I ha\'e 
 never heard from any other lips any discourse like 
 this, nor from his did I ever hear the like again. 
 
 His style suffered in his later days from 
 the abundance of the interspersed citations, and 
 from the overfulness and subtlety of the thought. 
 which occasionally led to obscurity. But when 
 he handled a topic in which learning was not 
 required, his style was clear, pointed and incisive, 
 sometimes epio^rammatic. Several vears ao-o he 
 wrote in a monthly magazine a short article u^jon 
 a biography of one of his contemporaries which 
 showed how admirable a master he was of polished 
 diction and penetrating analysis, and niade one 
 wish that he had more frequently consented to 
 dash off light work in a quick unstudied way. 
 
 To the work of a University professor he came 
 too late to acquire the art of fluent and forcible 
 oral discourse, nor was the character of his mind, 
 with its striving after a flawless exactitude of 
 statement, altogether fitted for the function of 
 presenting broad sunmiaries of facts to a youthful 
 audience. His prt'decessor in the Cambridge 
 chair of history, Sir John Seeley, with less know- 
 ledge, less subtlety, and less originality, had in 
 larger measure the gift of oral exposition and 
 the power of putting points, whether by speech
 
 39^ Biographical Studies 
 
 or by writing, in a clear and telling way. No one, 
 indeed, since Macaulay has been a better point- 
 putter than Seeley was. But Acton's lectures 
 (read from MS.) were models of lucid and stately 
 narrative informed by fulness of thought ; and 
 they were so delivered as to express the feeling 
 which each event had evoked in his own mind. 
 That sternness of character which revealed itself 
 in his judgments of men and books never affected 
 his relations to his pupils. Precious as his time 
 was, he gave it generously, encouraging them 
 to come to him for help and counsel. They 
 were awed by the majesty of his learning. Said 
 one of them to me, " When Lord Acton answers 
 a question put to him, I feel as if I were look- 
 ing at a pyramid. I see the point of it clear 
 and sharp, but I see also the vast subjacent 
 mass of solid knowledge." They perceived, 
 moreover, that to him History and Philosophy 
 were not two things but one, and perceived that 
 of History as well as of divine Philosophy it may 
 be said that she too is ''charming, and musical as 
 is Apollo's lute." Thus the impression produced in 
 the University by the amplitude of Lord Acton's 
 views, by the range of his learning, by the liber- 
 ality of his spirit and his unfailing devotion to 
 truth and to truth alone, was deep and fruitful. 
 
 When they wished that he had given to the world 
 more of his wisdom, his friends did not under- 
 value a life which was in itself a rare and exquisite
 
 Lord Acton 399 
 
 product of favouring nature and unwearied dili- 
 gence. They only regretted that the intluence of 
 his ideas, of his methods, and of his spirit, had 
 not been more widely diffused in an enduring 
 form. It was as when a plant unknown elsewhere 
 grows on some remote isle where ships seldom 
 touch. Few see the beauty of the tlower, and 
 here death came before the seed could be gathered 
 to be scattered in receptive soil. 
 
 To most men Lord Acton seemed reserved as 
 well as remote, presenting a smooth and shining 
 surface beneath which it was hard to penetrate. 
 He avoided publicity and popularity with the 
 tranquil dignity of one for whom the world of 
 knowledge and speculation was more than suffi- 
 cient. But he was a loyal friend, affectionate to 
 his intimates, gracious in his manners, blameless 
 in all the relations of life. Comparaliveh- few 
 of his countrymen knew his name, and those who 
 did thought of him chiefly as the confidant of Mr. 
 Gladstone, and as the most remarkable instance 
 of a sincere and steadfast Roman C atholic who 
 was a Liberal alike in [jolitics and in theology. 
 I)Ut those who had been admitted to his friend- 
 ship recognised him as one of the nnesl in- 
 telligences of his generation, an unsur[>assed, 
 and indeed a scarcely rivalletl, master of ever}' 
 subject which he touched.
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 
 
 Of no man who has lived in our times is it so 
 hard to speak in a concise and summary fashion 
 as of Mr. Gladstone. For fifty years he was so 
 closely associated with the public affairs of his 
 country that the record of his parliamentary life 
 is virtually an outline of English political history 
 during those years. His activity spread itself out 
 over many fields. He was the author of several 
 learned and thoughtful books, and of a multitude 
 of articles upon all sorts of subjects. He showed 
 himself as eagerly interested in matters of classi- 
 cal scholarship and Christian doctrine and eccle- 
 siastical history as in questions of national finance 
 and foreign policy. No account of him could be 
 complete without reviewing his actions and 
 estimating the results of his work in all these 
 directions. 
 
 But the difficulty of describing and judging 
 him goes deeper. His was a singularly complex 
 nature, whose threads it was hard to unravel. 
 His individuality was extremely strong. All that 
 he said or did bore its impress. Yet it was an 
 
 individuality so far from being self- consistent 
 
 400
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 401 
 
 as sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite 
 qualities capriciously united in a single person. 
 He might with equal truth have been called, and 
 he was in fact called, a conservative and a revolu- 
 tionary. He was dangerously impulsive, and had 
 frequently to suffer for his impulsiveness ; yet 
 he was also not merely prudent and cautious, 
 but so astute as to have been accused of craft 
 and dissimulation. So great was his respect 
 tor tradition that he clung to views regard- 
 ing the authorship of the Homeric poenis and 
 the date of the books of the Old Testa- 
 ment which nearly all competent specialists 
 have now rejected. So bold was he in prac- 
 tical matters that he carried through sweeping 
 changes in the British constitution, changed the 
 course of English policy in the nearer East, 
 overthrew an established church in one part of 
 the United Kinofdom, and committed himself 
 in principle to the o\'erthrow ot two other 
 established churches in other parts. He came 
 near to being a Roman Catholic in his religious 
 opinions, yet was for the last twenty years 
 of his life the trusted leader of the English 
 Protestant Nonconformists and the Scottish 
 Presbyterians. No one who knew him intimately 
 doubted his conscientious sinc(^rity and earnt;si- 
 ness, yet four-fifths of the English u])iM'r classes 
 were in his later years wont to regard him as a 
 self-interested schemer who would sacrifice his 
 
 2 I)
 
 402 Biographical Studies 
 
 country to his ambition. Though he loved 
 general principles, and often soared out of the 
 sight of his audience when discussing them, he 
 generally ended by deciding upon points of detail 
 the question at issue. He was at different times 
 of his life the defender and the assailant of the 
 same institutions, yet scarcely seemed incon- 
 sistent in doing opposite things, because his 
 methods and his arguments preserved the same 
 type and colour throughout. Those who had 
 at the beginning of his career discerned in him 
 the capacity for such diversities and contra- 
 dictions would probably have predicted that they 
 must wreck it by making his purposes fluctuating 
 and his course erratic. Such a prediction might 
 have proved true of any one with less firmness of 
 will and less intensity of temper. It was the 
 persistent heat and vehemence of his character, 
 the sustained passion which he threw into the 
 pursuit of the object on which he was for the 
 moment bent, that fused these dissimilar qualities 
 and made them appear to contribute to and 
 increase the total force which he exerted. 
 
 The circumstances of Mr. Gladstone's political 
 career help to explain, or, at any rate, will furnish 
 occasion for the attempt to explain, this com- 
 plexity and variety of character. But before I 
 come to his manhood it is convenient to advert 
 to three conditions whose influence on him was 
 profound the first his Scottish blood, the second
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 403 
 
 his Oxford education, the third his apprenticeship 
 to pubHc Hfe under Sir Robert Peel. 
 
 Theories of character based on race differences 
 are dangerous, because they are as hard to 
 test as they are easy to form. Still, we all 
 know that there are specific qualities and tend- 
 encies usually found in the minds of men of 
 certain stocks, just as there are peculiarities in 
 their faces or in their speech. Mr. Gladstone 
 was born and brought up in Liverpool, and 
 always retained a touch of Lancashire accent. 
 But, as he was fond of saying, every drop of 
 blood in his veins was Scotch, His father's 
 family belonged to the Scottish Lowlands, and 
 came from the neighbourhood of Biggar, in the 
 Upper Ward of Lanarkshire, where the ruined 
 walls of Gledstanes ^-- " the kite's rock" may 
 still be seen. His mother was ot Highland ex- 
 traction, by name Robertson, from Dingwall, in 
 Ross-shire. Thus he was not only a Scot, but a 
 Scot with a strong infusion of the; Celtic element, 
 the element whence the Scotch derive niost of 
 what distinguishes them from the northern Lng- 
 lish. The Scot is more excitable, more easily 
 brought to a glow of passion, more apt to be 
 eagerly absorbed in one thing at a time. He 
 is also more fond of exerting his intellect on 
 abstractions. It is not merely that the taste for 
 
 ^ "Glc<r" is a kite or hawk. The name was ( .hicl^lo;.. > till M:. 
 C'lkKistono's father (lrnj)[)e(l the fina: s.
 
 404 Biographical Studies 
 
 metaphysical theology is commoner in Scotland 
 than in England, but that the Scotch have a 
 stronger relish for general principles. They 
 like to set out by ascertaining and defining such 
 principles, and then to pursue a series of logical 
 deductions from them. They are, therefore, 
 bolder reasoners than the English, less content 
 to remain in the region of concrete facts, more 
 prone to throw themselves into the construc- 
 tion of a body of speculative doctrine. The 
 Englishman is apt to plume himself on being 
 right in spite of logic ; the Scotchman likes 
 to think that it is through logic he has reached 
 his results, and that he can by logic defend 
 them. These are qualities which Mr. Gladstone 
 drew from his Scottish blood. He had a keen 
 enjoyment of the processes of dialectic. He 
 loved to get hold of an abstract principle and to 
 derive all sorts of conclusions from it. He was 
 wont to begin the discussion of a question by 
 laying down two or three sweeping propositions 
 covering the subject as a whole, and would then 
 proceed to draw from these others which he 
 could apply to the particular matter in hand. 
 His well-stored memory and boundless ingenuity 
 made the discovery of such general propositions 
 so easy a task that a method in itself agreeable 
 sometimes appeared to be carried to excess. He 
 frequently arrived at conclusions which the judg- 
 ment of the common -sense auditor did not
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 405 
 
 approve, because, although they seemed to have 
 been legitimately deduced from the general 
 principles just enunciated, they were somehow 
 at variance with the plain teaching of the f^icts. 
 At such moments one felt that the man who 
 was fascinating but perplexing Englishmen by 
 his subtlety was not himself an Englishman 
 in mental quality, but had the love for abstrac- 
 tions and refinements and dialectical analysis 
 which characterises the Scotch intellect. He 
 had also a large measure of that warmth and 
 vehemence, called in the sixteenth century the 
 prcsfeiinduni ingenmin Scotonun, which belong to 
 the Scottish temperament, and particularly to the 
 Celtic Scot. He kindled quickly, and when 
 kindled, he shot forth a strong and brilliant tiame. 
 To any one with less power of self-control such 
 intensity of emotion as he frequently showed 
 would have been dangerous ; nor did this ex- 
 citability fail, even with him, to prompt words 
 and acts which a cooler judgment would have 
 disapproved. But it gave chat spontaneity which 
 was one of the charms of his nature ; it produced 
 that impression of profound earnestness and ot 
 resistless force which raised him out of lh(i rank 
 of ordinary statesmen. The rush of emotion 
 swelling fast and full seemed to turn the whole 
 stream of intellectual effort into whatexer channel 
 lay at the moment nearest. 
 
 With these Scottish qualities, Mr. Gladstone
 
 4o6 Biographical Studies 
 
 was brought up at school and college (Eton and 
 Christ Church) among Englishmen, and received 
 at Oxford, then lately awakened from a long 
 torpor, a bias and tendency which never there- 
 after ceased to affect him. The so-called 
 " Oxford Movement," which afterwards obtained 
 the name of Tractarianism and carried Newman 
 and Manning, together with other less famous 
 leaders, on to Rome, had not yet, in 1831, when 
 Mr. Gladstone obtained his degree with double 
 first-class honours, taken visible shape, or 
 become, so to speak, conscious of its own pur- 
 poses. But its doctrinal views, its peculiar vein 
 of religious sentiment, its respect for antiquit)- 
 and tradition, its proneness to casuistry, its taste 
 for symbolism, were already in the air as in- 
 fluences working on the more susceptible of 
 the younger minds. The religious atmosphere 
 Mr. Gladstone had breathed in boyhood was 
 what used to be called Evangelical ; and 
 his piety retained an Evangelical tinge until, 
 soon after quitting Oxford, he visited Italy. 
 The impressions he received there, and par- 
 ticularly in St. Peter's and in the Cathedral 
 of Naples, crystallised, so to speak, a group 
 of theological ideas already fluid in his mind. 
 He became, and never ceased to be, not 
 merely a High-churchman, but what may be 
 called an Anglo -Catholic, in his theology, 
 deferential not only to ecclesiastical tradition,
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 407 
 
 but to the living voice of the Visible Church, 
 revering the priesthood as the recipients (if 
 duly ordained) of a special grace and peculiar 
 powers, attaching great importance to the sacra- 
 ments, feeling himself nearer to the Church of 
 Rome, despite what he deemed her corruptions, 
 than to any of the non- Episcopal Protestant 
 churches. Henceforth his interests in life were 
 as much ecclesiastical as political. For a time 
 he desired to be ordained a clergyman. Had 
 this wish, abandoned in deference to his father's 
 advice, been carried out, he must eventually have 
 become a leading figure in the Church of Eng- 
 land and have sensibly affected her recent history. 
 The later stages in his career drew him away 
 from the main current ot political opinion within 
 that church. He who had been the strono-est 
 advocate of the principle of the State establish- 
 ment of religion came to be the chief actor in 
 the disestablishment of the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church in Ireland, and a supporter of the policy 
 of disestablishment in Scotland and in Wales. 
 But the colour which these early years gave 
 to his mind and thoughts was never el faced. 
 While they widened the range of his interests 
 and deepened his moral earnt.-stness, they at the 
 sanie time confirmed his natural bent toward over- 
 subtle distinctions and fine-drawn reasonings, and 
 put him out of sympathy not only with the attitude 
 of the average Phiglishman, who is essentially
 
 4o8 Biographical Studies 
 
 a Protestant that is to say, averse to sacer- 
 dotalism, and suspicious of any other religious 
 authority than that of the Bible and the indivi- 
 dual conscience but also with two of the 
 strongest influences of our time, the influence 
 of the sciences of nature, and the influence of 
 historical criticism. Mr, Gladstone, though too 
 wise to rail at science, as many religious men 
 did till within the last few years, could never 
 quite reconcile himself either to the conclusions 
 of geology and zoology regarding the history of 
 the physical world and the creatures which in- 
 habit it, or to modern methods of critical inquiry 
 as applied to Scripture and to ancient literature 
 generally. The training which Oxford then 
 gave, stimulating as it was, and free from the 
 modern error of over-specialisation, was defective 
 in omitting the experimental sciences, and in 
 laying undue stress upon the study of language. 
 A proneness to dwell on verbal distinctions and 
 to trust overmuch to the analysis of terms as a 
 means of reaching the truth of things is notice- 
 able in many eminent Oxford writers of that and 
 the next succeeding generation- some of them, 
 like the illustrious F. D. Maurice, far removed 
 from Cardinal Newman and Mr. Gladstone in 
 theological opinion. 
 
 When, bringing with him a brilliant University 
 reputation, he entered the House of Commons at 
 the age of twenty- three, Sir Robert Peel was
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 409 
 
 leading the Tory party with an authority and 
 ability rarely surpassed in the annals of parlia- 
 ment. Within two years the young man was 
 admitted into the short-lived Tory ministry of 
 1834, and soon proved himself a promising 
 lieutenant of the experienced chief. Peel was an 
 eminently wary man, alive to the necessity of 
 watching the signs of the times, of studying and 
 interpreting the changeful phases of public 
 opinion. Yet he always kept his own counsel. 
 Even when he perceived that the policy he 
 had hitherto followed would need to be modified, 
 Peel continued to use guarded language and did 
 not publicly commit himself to change till it 
 was plain that the fitting moment had arrived. 
 He was, moreover, a master of detail, slow to 
 propound a plan until he had seen how its out- 
 lines were to be filled up by appropriate devices 
 tor carrying it out in practice. These qualities 
 and habits of the minister profoundly attecled 
 his disciple. They became part ot the t(.'xture ot 
 Mr. Gladstone's political character, and in his 
 case, as in that of Peel, th(n' sometimes brought 
 censure upon him, as having locked up too long 
 within his breast views or purposes which he 
 thought it unwise to disclose till c;ik:ct could be 
 forthwith given to them. Such reserve, such a 
 guarded attitude and tendernc;ss for (,'xisting 
 institutions, may have been not altogether natural 
 to Mr. Gladstone's mind, but due partly to the
 
 41 o Biographical Studies 
 
 influence of Peel, partly to the tendency to 
 hold by tradition and the established order 
 which reverence for Christian antiquity and faith 
 in the dogmatic teachings of the Church had 
 planted deep in his soul. The contrast between 
 Mr. Gladstone's caution and respect for facts on 
 the one hand, and his reforming fervour on the 
 other, like the contrast which ultimately appeared 
 between his sacerdotal tendencies and his politi- 
 cal liberalism, contributed to make his character 
 perplexing and to expose his conduct to the 
 charge of inconsistency. Inconsistent, in the 
 proper sense of the word, he was not, much 
 less changeable. He was really, in his funda- 
 mental convictions and the main habits of his 
 mind, one of the most tenacious and persistent 
 of men. But there were always at work in him 
 two tendencies. One was the speculative desire 
 to probe everything to the bottom, to try it 
 by the light of general principles and logic, and 
 when it failed to stand this test, to reject it. 
 The other was the sense of the complexity of 
 existing social and political arrangements, and of 
 the risk of disturbing any one part of them until 
 the time had arrived for resettling other parts 
 also. Every statesman feels both these sides to 
 every concrete question of reform. No one has 
 set them forth more cogently, and in particular 
 no one has more earnestly dwelt on the neces- 
 sity for the latter side, than the most profound
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 411 
 
 thinker among British statesmen, Edmund Burke. 
 When Mr. Gladstone stated either side with his 
 incomparable force, people forgot that there was 
 another side which would be no less vividly present 
 to him at some other moment. He was not only, 
 like all successful parlianientarians, necessarily 
 something of an opportunist, though perhaps less 
 so than his master, but was moved by emotion 
 more than most statesmen, and certainly more 
 than Peel. The relative strength with which 
 the need for drastic reform or the need for watch- 
 ful conservatism as the case might be, presented 
 itself to his mind depended largely upon the 
 weight which his emotions cast into one or 
 other scale, and this emotional element made it 
 difficult to forecast his course. Thus his action 
 in public life was the result of influences differing 
 widely in their origin, influences, moreover, which 
 could be duly appreciated only by those who knew 
 him intimately. 
 
 Whoever has followed his political career has 
 been struck by the sharp divergence of the views 
 entertained by his fellow-countrymen a])()ut one 
 who had been lor so long a period under their 
 observation. That he was possessed of bound- 
 less energy and brilliant eloquence all agreed. 
 But agreement went no lurther. One section ot 
 the nation accused him ot sophistry, ol unwistlom, 
 of a want of patriotism, of a lust lor power. The 
 other section not only repelled these charges,
 
 412 Biographical Studies 
 
 but admired in him a conscientiousness and a 
 moral enthusiasm such as no political leader had 
 shown for centuries. When the qualities of his 
 mind and the aptitudes for politics which he 
 showed have been briefly examined, it will be 
 fitting to return to these divergent views of his 
 character, and endeavour to discover which of 
 them contains the larger measure of truth. 
 Meantime let it suffice to say that among the 
 reasons that led men to misjudge him, this union 
 in one person of opposite qualities was the chief 
 He was rather two men than one. Passionate 
 and impulsive on the emotional side of his nature, 
 he was cautious and conservative on the intel- 
 lectual. Few understood the conjunction ; still 
 fewer saw how much of what was perplexing in 
 his conduct it explained. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone sat for sixty-three years (1833- 
 1895) i^ Parliament, was for twenty-eight years 
 (1866- 1 894) the leader of his party, and was four 
 times Prime Minister. He began as a high 
 Tory, remained about fifteen years in that camp, 
 was then led by the split between Peel and the 
 Protectionists to take up an intermediate position, 
 and finally was forced to cast in his lot with the 
 Liberals, for in England, as in America, third 
 parties seldom endure. No parliamentary career 
 in English annals is comparable to his for its 
 length and variety ; and of those who saw its 
 close in the House of Commons, there was only
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 413 
 
 one man, Mr. Villicrs (who died in January 1898), 
 who could remember its beginning. Mr. Glad- 
 stone had been opposed in 1833 to men who might 
 have been his grandfathers ; he was opposed in 
 1894 to men who might have been his grand- 
 children. It is no part of my design to describe 
 or comment on the events of such a life. All that 
 can be done here is to indicate the more salient 
 characteristics which a study of his career as a 
 statesman and a parliamentarian sets before us. 
 
 The most remarkable of these characteristics 
 was the openness, freshness, and eagerness of 
 mind which he preserved down to the end of 
 his life. Most men form few new opinions 
 after thirty-five, just as they form few new- 
 intimacies. Intellectual curiosity may remain 
 even after fifty, but its range narrows as a man 
 abandons the hope of attaining any thorough 
 knowledge of subjects other than those which 
 make the main business of his life. It is impos- 
 sible to follow the progress ot all the new ideas 
 that are set alloat in the world, impossible to 
 be always examining the loundations ot one's 
 political or religious beliefs. Repeated dis- 
 appointments and disillusion ments make a man 
 expect less from changes the older he grows ; 
 while indolence deters him trom entering upon 
 new enterprises. None of these causes seemed 
 to affect Mr. Gladstone. Me was as much 
 excited over a new book (such as Cardinal
 
 4-14 Biographical Studies 
 
 Manning's Life) at eighty -four as when at 
 fourteen he insisted on compelling little Arthur 
 Stanley (afterwards Dean of Westminster, and 
 then aged nine) forthwith to procure and study 
 Gray's poems, which he had just perused himself 
 His reading covered almost the whole field 
 of literature, except physical and mathematical 
 science. While frequently declaring that he 
 must confine his political thinking and leader- 
 ship to a few subjects, he was so observant 
 of current events that the course of talk 
 brought up scarcely any topic in which he did 
 not seem to know what was the latest thing that 
 had been said or done. Neither the lassitude 
 nor the prejudices that usually accompany old age 
 prevented him from giving a fair consideration to 
 any new doctrines. But though his intellect was 
 restlessly at work, and though his curiosity dis- 
 posed him to relish novelties, except in theology, 
 that bottom rock in his mind of caution and re- 
 serve, which has already been referred to, made 
 him refuse to part with old views even when he 
 was beginning to accept new ones. He allowed 
 both to " lie on the table " together, and while 
 declaring himself open to conviction, felt it 
 safer to speak and act on the old lines till the 
 process of conviction had been completed. It 
 took fourteen years, from 1846 to i860, to carry 
 him from the Conservative into the Liberal camp. 
 It took five stormy years to bring him round to
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 415 
 
 Irish Home Rule, though his mind was constantly 
 occupied with the subject from 1880 to 18S5, 
 and those who watched him closely saw that 
 the process had advanced a long way even in 
 1882. And as regards ecclesiastical establish- 
 ments, having written a book in 1838 as a warm 
 advocate of State churches, it was not till 1867 
 that he adopted the policy of disestablishment 
 for Ireland, not till 1890 that he declared himself 
 ready to apply that policy in Wales and Scotland 
 also. 
 
 Both these qualities his disposition to revise 
 his opinions in the light of new arguments and 
 changing conditions, and the silence he main- 
 tained till the process of revision had been 
 completed exposed him to misconstruction. 
 Commonplace men, unwont to give serious 
 scrutiny to their opinions, ascribed his changes 
 to self-interest, or at best regarded them as the 
 index of an unstable purpose. Dull men could 
 not understand why he should have forl)()rne to 
 set forth all that was passing in his mind, and saw 
 little difference between reticence and dishonesty. 
 In so far as they shook public confidence, these 
 characteristics injured him in his statesman's 
 work. Yet the loss was outweighed by the gain. 
 In a country where opinion is active; and change- 
 ful, where the economic conditions that legislation 
 has to deal with are in a state? o( perpetual llux, 
 where the balance of power between the upper,
 
 41 6 Biographical Studies 
 
 the middle, and the poorer classes has been swiftly 
 altering during the last seventy years, no states- 
 man can continue to serve the public if he adheres 
 obstinately to the doctrines with which he started 
 in life. He must unless, of course, he stands 
 aloof in permanent isolation ^either subordinate 
 his own views to the general sentiment of his 
 party, and be driven to advocate courses he 
 secretly mislikes, or else, holding himself ready 
 to quit his party, if need be, must be willing 
 to learn from events, and to reconsider his 
 opinions in the light of emergent tendencies 
 and insistent facts. Mr. Gladstone's pride as 
 well as his conscience forbade the former alter- 
 native ; it was fortunate that the tireless activity 
 of his intellect made the latter natural to him. 
 He was accustomed to say that the capital fault 
 of his earlier days had been his failure adequately 
 to recognise the worth and power of liberty, and 
 the tendency which things have to work out for 
 good when left to themselves. The application 
 of this principle gave room for many develop- 
 ments, and many developments there were. He 
 may have shown less than was needed of that 
 prescience which is, after integrity and courage, 
 the highest gift of a statesman, but which can 
 seldom be expected from an English minister, 
 too engrossed to find time for the patient re- 
 flection from which alone sound forecasts can 
 issue. But he had the next best quality, that
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 417 
 
 of remaining accessible to new ideas and learning 
 from the events which passed under his eyes. 
 
 With this openness and flexibility of mind 
 there went a not less remarkable ingenuity 
 and resourcefulness. Fertile in expedients, he 
 was still more fertile in reasonings by which 
 to recommend the expedients. The gift had 
 its dangers, for he was apt to be carried away 
 by the dexterity of his own dialectic, and to 
 think that a scheme must be sound in whose 
 support he could muster a formidable array 
 of arguments. He never seemed at a loss, in 
 public or in private, for a criticism, or for an 
 answer to the criticisms of others. If his power 
 of adapting his own mind to the minds of those 
 whom he had to convince had been equal to the 
 skill and swiftness with which he accumulated a 
 mass of matter persuasive to those who looked 
 at things in his own way, no one would have 
 exercised so complete a control over the poli- 
 tical opinion of his time. But his intellect 
 lacked this power of adaptation. It moved on 
 lines of its own, which were often misconceiv('cl, 
 even by those who sought to follow him loyally. 
 Thus, as already observed, he was blamed for 
 two opposite faults. Some, pointing to ih(* fact 
 that he had frequently altered his views, de- 
 nounced him as a demagogue profuse of pro- 
 mises, ready to propose whatever he thought 
 likely to catch the people's ear. Others com-
 
 41 8 Biographical Studies 
 
 plained that there was no knowing where to 
 have him ; that he had an erratic mind, whose 
 currents ran underground and came to the 
 surface in unexpected places ; that he did not 
 consult his party, but followed his own im- 
 pulses ; that his guidance was unsafe because 
 his decisions were unpredictable. Much of 
 the suspicion with which he was regarded, 
 especially after 1885, arose from this view of 
 his character. 
 
 It was an unfair view, yet nearer to the truth 
 than that which charged him with seeking to flatter 
 and follow the people. No great popular leader 
 had in him less of the demagogue. He saw, 
 of course, that a statesman cannot oppose the 
 general will beyond a certain point, and may 
 have to humour it in small things that he may 
 direct it in great ones. He was obliged, as 
 others have been, to take up and settle questions 
 he deemed unimportant because they were 
 troubling the body politic. Now and then, in 
 his later days, he so far yielded to his party 
 advisers as to express his approval of proposals 
 in which his own interest was slight. But he 
 was ever a leader, not a follower, and erred 
 rather in not keeping his finger closely and 
 constantly upon the pulse of public opinion. In 
 this point, at least, one may discover in him a 
 likeness to Disraeli. Slow as he was in maturing 
 his opinions, Mr. Gladstone was liable to forget
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 419 
 
 that the minds of his followers might not be 
 moving along with his own, and hence his 
 decisions sometimes took his party as well as 
 the nation by surprise. But he was too self- 
 absorbed, too eagerly interested in the ideas that 
 suited his own cast of thought, to be able to 
 watch and gauge the tendencies of the multitude. 
 The three most remarkable instances in which 
 his new departures startled the world were his 
 declarations against the Irish Church establish- 
 ment in 1867, against the Turks and the tradi- 
 tional English policy of supporting them in 1876, 
 and in favour of Irish Home Rule in 1886, and 
 in none of these did any popular demand suggest 
 his pronouncement. It was the masses who took 
 their view from him, not he who took a mandate 
 from the masses. In each of these cases he may, 
 perhaps, be blamed for not having sooner perceived, 
 or at any rate for not having sooner announced, 
 the need for a change of policy. But It was very 
 characteristic of him not to give the full strength 
 of his mind to a question till he felt that it pressed 
 for a solution. Those who listened to his private 
 talk were scarcely more struck by the range of 
 his vision than by his unwillingness to commit 
 himself on matters whose decision he could 
 postpone. Reticence and caution were some- 
 times carried too far, not merely because they 
 exposed him to misconstruction, but because 
 they withheld from his party the guidance it
 
 420 Biographical Studies 
 
 needed. This was true in the three instances 
 just mentioned ; and in the last of them it is 
 possible that earlier and fuller communications 
 might have averted the separation of some of 
 his former colleagues. Nor did he always 
 rightly divine the popular mind. His pro- 
 posal (in 1874) to extinguish the income-tax 
 fell completely flat, because the nation was 
 becoming indifferent to that economy in public 
 expenditure which both parties had in the days 
 of Peel and Lord John Russell vied in demanding. 
 Cherishing his old financial ideals, Mr. Gladstone 
 had not marked the change. So he failed to 
 perceive how much the credit of his party was 
 suffering (after 1871) from the belief of large 
 sections of the people, that he was indifferent 
 to the interests of England outside England. 
 Perhaps, knowing the charge of indifference to 
 be groundless, he underrated the effect which the 
 iteration of it produced : perhaps his pride would 
 not let him stoop to dissipate it. 
 
 Though the power of reading the signs of 
 the times and swaying the mind of the nation 
 may be now more essential to an English 
 statesman than the skill which manages a legis- 
 lature or holds together a cabinet, that skill 
 counts for much, and must continue to do so 
 while the Elouse of Commons remains the 
 governing authority of the country. A man 
 can hardly reach high place, and certainly can-
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 421 
 
 not retain high place, without possessing this 
 kind of art. Mr. Gladstone was at one time 
 thought to want it. In 1864, when Lord Palmer- 
 ston's end was approaching, and jNIr. Gladstone 
 had shown himself the strongest man among 
 the Liberal ministers in the House of Com- 
 mons, people speculated about the succession 
 to the headship of the party ; and the wise- 
 acres of the day were never tired of repeating 
 that Mr. Gladstone could not possibly lead the 
 House of Commons. He wanted tact, they said, 
 he was too excitable, too impulsive, too much 
 absorbed in his own ideas, too unversed in the 
 arts by which individuals are conciliated. But 
 when, after twenty-five years of his unquestioned 
 reign, the time for his own departure drew nigh, 
 men asked how the Liberal party in the House 
 of Commons would ever hold together after it 
 had lost a leader of such consummate capacity. 
 The Whig critics of 1864 had grown so accus- 
 tomed to Palmerston's way of handling the House 
 as to forget that a man might succeed by quite 
 different methods, and that defects, serious in 
 themselves, may be outweighed by transcendent 
 merits. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone had the defects ascribed to 
 him. His impulsiveness sometimes betrayed 
 him into declarations which a cooler reflection 
 would have dissuaded. The second reading 
 of the Irish Home Rule Bill of i8S6 might
 
 42 2 Biographical Studies 
 
 possibly have been carried had he not been 
 goaded by his opponents into words which 
 were construed as recalling or modifying the 
 concessions he had announced at a meeting 
 of the Liberal party held just before. More 
 than once precious time was wasted because an- 
 tagonists, knowing his excitable temper, brought 
 on discussions with the sole object of annoying 
 him and drawing from him some hasty deliverance. 
 Nor was he an adept, like Disraeli and Dis- 
 raeli's famous Canadian imitator, Sir John A. 
 Macdonald, in the management of individuals. 
 His aversion for the meaner side of human 
 nature made him refuse to play upon it. Many 
 of the pursuits, and most of the pleasures, 
 which attract ordinary men had no interest for 
 him, so that much of the common ground on 
 which men meet was closed to him. He was, 
 moreover, too constantly engrossed by the sub- 
 jects he loved, and by enterprises which specially 
 appealed to him, to have leisure for the lighter 
 but often vitally important devices of political 
 strategy. I remember hearing, soon after 1870, 
 how Mr. Delane, then editor of the Times, had 
 been invited to meet the Prime Minister at a 
 moment when the support of that newspaper 
 would have been specially valuable to the Liberal 
 Government. Instead of using the opportunity 
 in the way that had been intended, Mr. Gladstone 
 dilated during the whole time of dinner upon
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 423 
 
 the approaching exhaustion of the EngHsh coal- 
 beds, to the surprise of the company and the un- 
 concealed annoyance of the powerful guest. It 
 was the subject then uppermost in his mind, and 
 he either forgot, or disdained, to conciliate Mr. 
 Delane. Good nature as well as good sense 
 made him avoid giving oftence by personal re- 
 flections in debate, and he usually suffered fools, 
 if not, like St. Paul's converts, gladly, yet 
 patiently.^ In the House of Commons he was 
 entirely free from airs, and, indeed, from any 
 assumption of superiority. The youngest member 
 might accost him in the lobby and be listened 
 to with perfect courtesy. But he had a bad 
 memory for faces, seldom addressed any one 
 outside the circle of his personal friends, and 
 more than once made enemies by omitting 
 to notice and show attention to recruits who, 
 having been eminent in their own towns, expected 
 to be made much of when they entered Parliament. 
 Having himself plenty of pride and comparative!)- 
 little vanity, he never realised the extent to which, 
 and the cheapness with which, men can be captured 
 and used throuofh their vanitv. Adherents were 
 
 ' One of liis iiio>; inlinia'.c fiicr. ! h.i-, I liink, -,iiil \h.\[ Ii r.^'v.-i 
 knew wlial il was tn he hoic!." I'liitiuiatc, iii/ienl. ss^ml i h- iiuj i r-.;, 
 had this been mi; hut tha" iiu- wlio lia.i v.atilu-1 i'.iin Im- aii.i i-:<.>-!y 
 should make the statement sl-.ow > how -eiitly hoMs T.ire i a: h'- ha:vK, 
 
 I recollect his once reniaikiii'.; on ihe rajiacity tor hoiin; oo-^c ! hy 
 a gentleman who had been inlroduc-i au'i ha'! talked { : - r,-- li:;.\';i 
 minute.-, to him ; hut Ids own m:.:;P.',r th.rou'^di the convert r.i' n h. id !)."ra\e ! 
 no impatience.
 
 424 Biographical Studies 
 
 sometimes turned into dangerous foes because 
 his preoccupation with graver matters dimmed his 
 sense of what may be done to win support by the 
 minor arts, such as an invitation to dinner or even a 
 seasonable compHment. And his mind, flexible as 
 it was in seizing new points of view and devising 
 expedients to meet new circumstances, did not 
 easily enter into the characters of other men. 
 Ideas and causes interested him more than did 
 personal traits ; his sympathy was keener and 
 stronger for the sufferings of nations or masses 
 of men than with the fortunes of an individual 
 man. With all his accessibility and kindli- 
 ness, he was at bottom chary of real friendship, 
 while the circle of his intimates became constantly 
 smaller with advancing years. So it befell that 
 though his popularity among the general body 
 of his adherents went on increasing, and the 
 admiration of his parliamentary followers remained 
 undiminished, he had in the House of Commons 
 few personal friends who linked him to the party 
 at large, and rendered to him those confidential 
 services which count for much in keeping all 
 sections in hearty accord and enabling the com- 
 mander to gauge the sentiment of his troops. 
 
 Of parliamentary strategy in that larger sense, 
 which covers familiarity with parliamentary forms 
 and usages, care and judgment in arranging the 
 business of the House, the power of seizing a 
 parliamentary situation and knowing how to
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 425 
 
 deal with it, the art of guiding a debate and 
 choosing the right moment for reserve and for 
 openness, for a dignified retreat, for a watch- 
 ful defence, for a sudden rattling charge upon the 
 enemy of all this no one had a fuller mastery. 
 His recollection of precedents was unrivalled, for 
 it began in 1833 with the first reformed Parlia- 
 ment, and it seemed as fresh for those remote 
 days as for last month. He enjoyed combat for 
 its own sake, not so much from inborn pug- 
 nacity, for he was not disputatious in ordinary 
 conversation, as because it called out his fighting 
 force and stimulated his whole nature. " I am 
 never nervous in reply," he once said, " though I 
 am sometimes nervous in opening a debate." No 
 one could be more tactful or adroit when a crisis 
 arrived whose gravity he had foreseen. In the 
 summer of 1881 the House of Lords made some 
 amendments to the Irish Land Bill which were 
 deemed ruinous to the working of the measure, 
 and therewith to the prospects of the pacificcUion 
 of Ireland. A conflict was expected which might 
 have strained the fabric of the constitution. The 
 excitement which cjuickly arose in Parliament 
 spread to the nation. Mr. Gladstone alone 
 remained calm and confident. He dc; vised a 
 series of compromises, which he advocated in con- 
 ciliatory speeches. He so played his game that 
 by a few minor concessions he secured nearly all 
 the points he cared for, and, while sparing the
 
 426 Biographical Studies 
 
 dignity of the Lords, steered his bill triumphantly 
 out of the breakers which had threatened to 
 engulf it. Very different was his ordinary de- 
 meanour in debate when he was off his guard. 
 His face and gestures while he sat in the House 
 of Commons listening to an opponent would 
 express all the emotions that crossed his mind. 
 He would follow every sentence as a hawk follows 
 the movements of a small bird, would some- 
 times contradict half aloud, sometimes turn to 
 his next neighbour to vent his displeasure at the 
 groundless allegations or fallacious arguments he 
 was listening to, till at last, like a hunting leopard 
 loosed from the leash, he would spring to his 
 feet and deliver a passionate reply. His warmth 
 would often be in excess of what the occasion 
 required, and quite disproportioned to the im- 
 portance of his antagonist. It was in fact the 
 unimportance of the occasion that made him thus 
 yield to his feeling. As soon as he saw that 
 bad weather was coming, and careful seaman- 
 ship wanted, his coolness returned, his language 
 became measured, while passion, though it might 
 increase the force of his oratory, never made him 
 deviate a hand's breadth from the course he 
 had chosen. The Celtic heat subsided, and the 
 shrewd self-control of the Lowland Scot regained 
 command. 
 
 It was by oratory that Mr. Gladstone rose to 
 fame and power, as, indeed, by it most English
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 427 
 
 statesmen have risen, sav^e those to whom wealth 
 and rank and family connections used to give a 
 sort of presumptive claim to high office, like the 
 Cavendishes and the Russells, the Bentincks and 
 the Cecils. And for many years, during which Mr. 
 Gladstone was suspected as a statesman because, 
 while he had ceased to be a Tory, he had not fully 
 become a Liberal, his eloquence was the main, one 
 might almost say the sole, source of his intluence. 
 Oratory was a power in English politics even a 
 century and a half ago, as the career of the 
 elder Pitt shows. During the last seventy years, 
 years which have seen the power of rank and 
 family connections decline, it has, although 
 less cultivated as a fine art, continued to be 
 almost essential to the highest success, and it 
 still brings a man quickly to the front, though it 
 will not keep him there should he prove to want 
 the other branches of statesmanlike capacity. 
 
 The permanent reputation of an orator depends 
 upon two things, the witness of contemporaries 
 to the impression produced upon them, and the 
 written or printed record of his speeches. hew 
 are the famous speakers who would be tamous 
 if they were tried by this latter test alone, and 
 Mr. Gladstone was not one of them. It is only 
 by a rare combination of gills that one who 
 speaks with so much force and brillianci; as 
 to charm his listeners is also able to deliver 
 thoughts so valuable in words so choice that
 
 428 Biographical Studies 
 
 posterity will read them as literature. Some 
 of the ancient orators did this ; but we seldom 
 know how far those of their speeches which 
 have been preserved are the speeches which 
 they actually delivered. Among moderns, a few 
 French preachers, Edmund Burke, Macaulay, and 
 Daniel Webster are perhaps the only speakers 
 whose discourses have passed into classics and 
 find new generations of readers.^ Twenty years 
 hence r\Ir. Gladstone's will not be read, except, of 
 course, by historians. Indeed, they ceased to be 
 read even in his lifetime. They are too long, 
 too diffuse, too minute in their handling of details, 
 too elaborately qualified in their enunciation of 
 general principles. They contain few epigrams 
 and few of those weighty thoughts put into telling 
 phrases which the Greeks called yvcbfMai. The 
 style, in short, is not sufficiently rich or polished 
 to give an enduring interest to matter whose 
 practical importance has vanished. The same 
 oblivion has overtaken all but a few of the 
 best speeches (or parts of speeches) of Grattan, 
 Sheridan, Pitt, Fox, Erskine, Canning, Plunket, 
 Brougham, Peel, Bright. It may, indeed, be 
 said and the examples of Burke and Macaulay 
 show that this is no paradox that the speakers 
 whom posterity most enjoys are rarely those who 
 
 ' Sermons belong to a somewhat different category, else I should have 
 to add the discourses of a few great preachers, such as Robert Hall, J. H. 
 Newman, Phillips Brooks.
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 429 
 
 most affected the audiences that Hstened to 
 them.' 
 
 If. on the other hand, Mr. Gladstone be judged 
 by the impression he made on his own time, his 
 place will be high in the front rank. His speeches 
 were neither so concisely telling as Mr. Bright's 
 nor so finished in diction ; but no other man 
 among his contemporaries neither Lord Derby 
 nor Mr, Lowe, nor Lord Beaconsfield nor Lord 
 Cairns, nor Bishop Wilberforce nor Bishop IMac^ee 
 taken all round, could be ranked beside him. 
 And he rose superior to Mr. Bright himself in 
 readiness, in variety of knowledge, in persuasive 
 ingenuity. Mr. Bright spoke seldom and required 
 time for preparation. Admirable in the breadth 
 and force with which he set forth his own position, 
 or denounced that of his adversaries, he was 
 not equally qualified for instructing nor equally 
 apt at persuading. Mr. Gladstone could both 
 instruct and persuade, could stimulate his triends 
 and demolish his opponents, and could do all 
 these thinofs at an hour's notice, so vast and well 
 ordered was the arsenal ot his mind. Pitt was 
 superb in an e.xpository or argumentati\e speech, 
 but his stately periods lacked variety. Fox, in- 
 comparable in reply, was hesitating and contused 
 when he had to state his case in cold blcjod. 
 
 ' Though i)nc of Macauiay',- ^jK-cche- (thi' aL;.ii!:v [he vxclv.^i^n of thi- 
 Muster iif the Rolls from tli'.' Il.'ii-r L'i C' ;ii:ii. iii-) ha ! '.lie v.xf l-.'.iiour of 
 lurniu'' voles.
 
 430 Biographical Studies 
 
 Mr. Gladstone showed as much fire in winding 
 up a debate as skill in opening it. 
 
 His oratory had, indeed, two faults. It wanted 
 concentration, and it wanted definition. There 
 were too many words, and the conclusion was 
 sometimes left vague because the arguments had 
 been too nicely balanced. I once heard Mr. 
 Cobden say : " I always listen to Mr. Gladstone 
 with pleasure and admiration, but I sometimes 
 have to ask myself, when he has sat down, ' What 
 after all was it that he meant, and what practical 
 course does he recommend ? ' " These faults 
 were balanced by conspicuous merits. There 
 was a lively imagination, which enabled him 
 to relieve even dull matter by pleasing figures, 
 together with a large command of quotations 
 and illustrations. There were powers of sarcasm, 
 powers, however, which he rarely used, pre- 
 ferring the summer lightning of banter to the 
 thunderbolts of invective. There was admirable 
 lucidity and accuracy in exposition. There was 
 art in the disposition and marshalling of his 
 arguments, and finally a gift now almost lost 
 in England there was a delightful variety and 
 grace of appropriate gesture. But above and 
 beyond everything else which enthralled the 
 listener, there stood out four qualities. Two of 
 them were merits of substance inventiveness and 
 elevation ; two were merits of delivery force in 
 the manner, expressive modulation in the voice.
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 431 
 
 No one showed such swift resourcefulness in 
 debate. His readiness, not only at catching a 
 point, but at making the most of it on a moment's 
 notice, w-as amazing. Some one would lean over 
 the back of the bench he sat on and show a 
 paper or whisper a sentence to him. Appre- 
 hending the bearings at a glance, he would take 
 the bare fact and so shape and develop it, like 
 a potter moulding a bowl on the wheel out of 
 a lump of clay, that it grew into a cogent 
 argument or a happy illustration under the eye of 
 the audience, and seemed all the more telling 
 because it had not been originally a part of his 
 case. Even in the last three years of his parlia- 
 mentary life, when his sight had so failed that he 
 read nothing, printed or written, except what it 
 was absolutely necessary to read, and when his 
 deafness had so increased that he did not hear 
 half of what was said in debate, it was sufficient for 
 a colleague to say into the better ear a few 
 words explaining how the matter at issue stood, 
 and he would rise to his feet and extctmporise 
 a long and ingenious argunient, or retreat with 
 dexterous grace from a position which the course 
 of the discussion or the private warning of the 
 Whips had shown to be untenable. XeveT was 
 he seen at a loss either to meet a ncnv |joini raised 
 by an adversary or to make the best ot an un- 
 expected incident. Sometimes he would amuse 
 himself by drawing a cheer or a contradiction
 
 432 Biographical Studies 
 
 from his opponents, and would then suddenly turn 
 round and use this hasty expression of their 
 opinion as the basis for a fresh argument of his 
 own. Loving conflict, he loved debate, and, 
 so far from being confused or worried by the 
 strain conflict put upon him, his physical health 
 was strengthened and his faculties were roused 
 to higher efficiency by having to prepare and 
 deliver a great speech. He had the rare faculty 
 of thinking ahead while he was speaking, and 
 could, while pouring forth a stream of glittering 
 sentences, be at the same time (as one saw by 
 watching his eye) composing an argument to be 
 delivered five or ten minutes later. Once, at a 
 very critical moment, when he was defending a 
 great measure against the amendment moved 
 by a nominal supporter of his own which proved 
 fatal to it, a friend suddenly reminded him of 
 an incident in the career of the mover which might 
 be effectively used against him. When Mr. Glad- 
 stone sat down after delivering an impassioned 
 speech, in the course of which he had several 
 times approached and then sheered off from the 
 incident, he turned round to the friend and said, 
 " I was thinking all the time I was speaking 
 
 whether I could properly use against what 
 
 you told me, but concluded, on the whole, that 
 it would be too hard on him." 
 
 The weakness of his eloquence sprang from its 
 supersubtlety and superabundance. He was prone
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 433 
 
 to fine distinctions. He multiplied arguments when 
 it would have been better to rely upon two or 
 three of the strongest. And he was sometimes 
 so intent on refuting the particular adversaries 
 opposed to him, and persuading the particular 
 audience before him, that he forgot to address 
 his reasonings to the public beyond the House 
 and make them equally applicable and equally 
 convincing to the readers of next morning. 
 
 As dignity is one of the rarest qualities in 
 literature, so elevation is one of the rarest in 
 oratory. It is a quality easier to feel than to 
 analyse. One may call it a power of ennobling 
 ordinary things by showing their relation to great 
 things, by pouring high emotions round them, 
 by bringing the worthier motives of human 
 conduct to bear upon them, l)y touching them 
 with the light of poetry. Ambitious writers and 
 speakers strain after effects of this kind ; but 
 they are effects which study and straining 
 cannot ensure. Vainly do most men tlap their 
 wings in the effort to soar ; if they succeed 
 in rising from the ground it is because some 
 unusually strong burst of feeling makes them 
 for the moment better than themselves. In 
 Mr. Gladstone the capacity for feeling was at 
 all times so strong, and the susceptibility of the 
 imagination so keen, that he soared without 
 effort. His vision seemed to take in th(; whole 
 landscape. The points actually in cjuestion 
 
 2
 
 434 Biographical Studies 
 
 might be small, but the principles involved were 
 to him far-reaching. The contests of to-day 
 were ennobled by the effect they might have in 
 a still distant future. There are rhetoricians 
 skilful in playing by words and manner on every 
 chord of human nature, rhetoricians who move 
 you, and may even carry you away for the 
 moment, but whose sincerity is doubted, because 
 the sense of spontaneity is lacking. Mr. Glad- 
 stone was not of these. He never seemed to be 
 forcing an effect or assuming a sentiment. To 
 listen to him was to feel convinced of his own 
 conviction and to be warmed by the warmth with 
 which he expressed it. Nor was this due to the 
 perfection of his rhetorical art. He really did 
 feel what he expressed. Sometimes, of course, 
 like all statesmen, he had to maintain a cause 
 whose weakness he perceived, as, for instance, 
 when it became necessary to defend the blunder 
 of a colleague, or a decision reached by some 
 Cabinet compromise which his own judgment dis- 
 approved. But even in such cases he did not simu- 
 late feeling, but reserved his earnestness for those 
 parts of the case on which it could be honestly ex- 
 pended. As this was generally true of the imagin- 
 ative and emotional side of his eloquence, so was 
 it especially true of his unequalled power of lifting 
 a subject from the level on which other speakers 
 had treated it into the purer air of permanent 
 principle, perhaps even of moral sublimity.
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 435 
 
 The dignity and spontaneity which marked the 
 substance of his speeches was no less conspicuous 
 in their dehvery. Nothing could be more easy and 
 graceful than his manner on ordinary occasions, 
 nothing more grave and stately than it became 
 when he was making a ceremonial reference 
 to some public event or bestowing a meed of 
 praise on the departed. His expository dis- 
 courses, such as those with which he introduced 
 a complicated bill or unfolded a financial state- 
 ment, were models of their kind, not only for 
 lucidity, but for the pleasant smoothness, never 
 lapsing into monotony, with which the stream 
 of speech flowed from his lips. The task was 
 performed so well that people thought it an 
 easy task till they saw how inferior were the 
 performances of two subsecjuent chancellors of 
 the exchequer so able in their respective 
 ways as Sir Stafford Northcote and Mr. Lowe. 
 But when an occasion arrived which (|uickened 
 men's pulses in the House of Commons, a place 
 where feeling rises as suddenly as do the waves 
 of a Highland loch when a squall comes rush- 
 ing down the glen, the vehemence ot his leeling 
 found expression in the fire ot his eye and the 
 resistless strength ol his words. His ulterance 
 did not grow swifter, nor did the: kt;y of his 
 voice rise, as passion raises and sharpens the 
 voice in most men. But the measured torce with 
 which everv sentence was launched, like a shell
 
 43 6 Biographical Studies 
 
 hurtling through the air, the concentrated in- 
 tensity of his look, as he defied antagonists in 
 front and swept his glance over the ranks of his 
 supporters around and behind him, had a startling 
 and thrilling power which no other Englishman 
 could exert, and which no Englishman had exerted 
 since the days of Pitt and Fox, The whole proud, 
 bold, ardent nature of the man seemed to flash 
 out, and one almost forgot what the lips said in 
 admiration of the towering personality. 
 
 People who read next day the report in the 
 newspapers of a speech delivered on such an 
 occasion could not comprehend the impression 
 it had made on the listeners. " What was there 
 in it so to stir you ? " they asked. They had not 
 seen the glance and the gestures; they had not 
 heard the vibrating voice rise to an organ peal 
 of triumph or sink to a whisper of entreaty. Mr. 
 Gladstone's voice was naturally rich and resonant. 
 It was a fine singing voice, and a pleasant voice 
 to listen to in conversation, not the less pleasant 
 for having a slight trace of Liverpool accent 
 clinging to it. But what struck one in listening 
 to his speeches was not so much the quality of 
 the vocal chords as the skill with which they were 
 managed. He had a gift of sympathetic ex- 
 pression, of throwing his feeling into his voice, 
 and using its modulations to accompany and 
 convey every shade of meaning, like that which 
 a great composer exerts when he puts music to a
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 437 
 
 poem, or a great executant when he renders at 
 once the composer's and the poet's thought. And 
 just as accompHshed singers or violinists enjoy 
 the practice of their art, so he rejoiced, perhaps 
 unconsciously, yet intensely, in putting forth this 
 faculty of expression ; as appeared, indeed, from 
 the fact that whenever his voice failed him 
 (which sometimes befell in later years) his 
 words came less easily, and even the chariot of 
 his argument seemed to drive heavily. That 
 the voice should so seldom have failed was 
 wonderful. When he had passed his seventy- 
 fifth year, it became sensibly inferior in volume 
 and depth of tone. But its variety and delicacy 
 remained. In April 1886, he being then seventy- 
 seven, it held out during a speech of nearly 
 four hours in length. In February 1S90 it 
 enabled him to deliver with extraordinary effect 
 an eminently solemn and pathetic appeal. In 
 March 1894 those who listened to it the last time 
 it was heard in Parliament they were com- 
 paratively few, for the secret of his impending 
 resignation had been well kept recognised in it 
 all the old charm. The most striking instance I 
 recall of the power it could exert is to be found 
 in a speech made in 1S83, during one of the 
 tiresome debates occasioned by the refusal of 
 the Opposition and of some timorous Liberals 
 to allow Mr. Bradlaugh to be sworn as a member 
 of the House of Commons. This speech pro-
 
 438 Biographical Studies 
 
 duced on those who heard it an impression 
 which its perusal to-day fails to explain. That 
 impression was chiefly due to the grave and 
 reverent tone in which he delivered some 
 sentences stating the view that it is not our 
 belief in the bare existence of a Deity, but the 
 realising of him as being a Providence ruling 
 the world, that has moral value and significance 
 for us. And it was due in particular to the solemn 
 dignity with which he declaimed six lines of 
 Lucretius, setting forth the Epicurean view that 
 the gods do not concern themselves with human 
 affairs. There were perhaps not twenty men 
 in the House of Commons who could follow the 
 sense of the lines so as to appreciate their bearing 
 on his argument. But these sonorous hexameters 
 hexameters that seemed to have lived on 
 through nineteen centuries to find their applica- 
 tion from the lips of an orator to-day the sense 
 of remoteness in the strange language and the 
 far-off heathen origin, the deep and moving note 
 in the speaker's voice, thrilled the imagination 
 of the audience and held it spellbound, lifting for 
 a moment the whole subject of debate into a region 
 far above party conflicts. Spoken by any one else, 
 the passage culminating in these Lucretian lines 
 might have produced little effect. It was the voice 
 and manner, above all the voice, with its marvel- 
 lous modulations, that made the speech majestic. 
 Yet one must not forget to add that with him,
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 439 
 
 as with some other famous statesmen, the im- 
 pression made by a speech was in a measure due 
 to the admiring curiosity and wonder which his 
 personaHty inspired. He was so much the most 
 interesting human being in the House oi" Com- 
 mons that, when he withdrew, many members 
 said that the place had lost half its attraction for 
 them, and that the chamber looked empty because 
 he was not in it. Plenty of able men remained. 
 But even the ablest seemed ordinary when com- 
 pared with the figure that had vanished, a figure 
 in whom were combined, as in no other man of 
 his time, an unrivalled experience, an extraordinary 
 activity and versatility of intellect, a fervid imagina- 
 tion, and an indomitable will. 
 
 Though Mr. Gladstone's oratory was a main 
 source of his power, both in Parliament and over 
 the people, the effort of detractors to represent 
 him as a mere rhetorician will seem absurd 
 to the historian who reviews his whole career. 
 The rhetorician adorns and popularises the ideas 
 which have originated with others ; he advocates 
 policies which others have devised ; he follows 
 and expresses the sentiments which already i)re- 
 vail in his party. Mr. Gladstone was himself a 
 source of new ideas and new policies ; he evoked 
 new sentiments or turned old sentiments into 
 new channels. Neither was he, as some alleged, 
 primarily a destroyer. His conservative in- 
 stincts were strong ; he cherished ancient custom.
 
 440 Biographical Studies 
 
 When it became necessary to clear away an 
 institution he sought to put something else in 
 its place. He was a constructive statesman not 
 less conspicuously than were Pitt, Canning, and 
 Peel. Whether he was a philosophic statesman, 
 basing his action on large views obtained by 
 thought and study, philosophic in the sense in 
 which we apply the epithet to Pericles, Machia- 
 velli, Turgot, Burke, Jefferson, Hamilton, Stein 
 if one class can be made to include persons 
 otherwise so dissimilar may perhaps be doubted. 
 There are few instances in history of men who 
 have been great thinkers and also great legis- 
 lators or administrators, because the two kinds of 
 capacity almost exclude one another. As experts 
 declare that a man who should try to operate on 
 the Stock Exchange in reliance upon a profound 
 knowledge of the inner springs of European 
 politics and the financial resources of the great 
 States, would ruin himself before his perfectly 
 correct calculations had time to come true, so a 
 practical statesman, though he cannot know too 
 much, or look too far ahead, must beware of trust- 
 ing his own forecasts, must remember that he 
 has to deal with the next few months or years, 
 and to persuade persons who cannot be expected 
 to share or even to understand his views of the 
 future. The habit of meditating on underlying 
 truths, the tendency to play the long game, are 
 almost certain to spoil a man for dealing effectively
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 441 
 
 with the present. He will not be a sufficiently- 
 vigilant observer ; he will be out of sympathy 
 with the notions of the average man ; his argu- 
 ments will go over the head of his audience. 
 No English prime minister has looked at politics 
 with the eye of a philosopher. But Mr. Glad- 
 stone, if hardly to be called a thinker, showed 
 higher constructive power than any one else 
 has done since Peel. Were the memory of his 
 oratorical triumphs to pass completely away, he 
 would deserve to be remembered in respect of 
 the mark he left upon the British statute-book and 
 of the changes he wrought both in the constitu- 
 tion of his country and in her European policy. 
 
 Three groups of measures stand out as monu- 
 ments of his skill and energy. The first of these 
 three includes the financial reforms embodied in 
 a series of fourteen budgets between the years 
 1853 and 1882, the most famous of which were 
 the budgets of 1853 and i860. In the former he 
 continued the work begun by Peel by reducing 
 and simplifying the customs duties. Deficiencies 
 in revenue were supplied by the enactment of less 
 oppressive imposts, and particularly by resettling 
 the income-tax, and by the introduction ot a suc- 
 cession duty on real estate. The preparation and 
 passing of this very technical and intricate Suc- 
 cession Duty Act was a most laborious enter[)rise, 
 of which Mr. Gladstone ust'd to speak as the 
 severest mental strain he had ever undergone :
 
 442 Biographical Studies 
 
 Kapria-Trjv St) T7p ye fji,d\rjv (fidro BvfxevaL dv8pu)v.^ 
 
 The budget of i860, among other changes, 
 abolished the paper duty, a boon to the press 
 which was resisted by the House of Lords. 
 They threw out the measure, but in the follow- 
 ing year Mr. Gladstone forced them to submit. 
 His achievements in the field of finance equal, if 
 they do not surpass, those of Peel, and are not 
 tarnished, as in the case of Pitt, by the recollec- 
 tion of a burden of debts incurred. To no 
 minister can be ascribed so large a share in 
 promoting the commercial and industrial pro- 
 sperity of modern England, and in the reduction 
 of her national debt to the figure at which it 
 stood when it began to rise again in 1900. 
 
 The second group includes the parliamentary 
 reform bills of 1866 and 1884 and the Redistribu- 
 tion Bill of 1885. The first of these was defeated 
 in the House of Commons, but it led to the 
 passing next year, by Mr. Disraeli, of a more 
 sweeping measure. Taken together, these statutes 
 have turned Britain into a democratic country, 
 changing the character of her government almost 
 as profoundly as did the Reform Act of 1832. 
 
 The third group consists of a series of Irish 
 measures, beginning with the Church Disestab- 
 lishment Act of 1869, and including the Land 
 Act of 1870, the University Education Bill of 
 
 1 " lie said that this was the hardest battle of men he had entered," 
 Iliad \\. 185.
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 443 
 
 1873 (defeated in the House of Commons), the 
 Land iVct of 1881, and the Home Rule bills of 
 1 886 and 1893. All these were in a special 
 manner Mr. Gladstone's handiwork, prepared as 
 well as brought in and advocated by him. All 
 were highly complicated, and of one, the Land 
 Act of 1 88 1, which it took three months to carry 
 through the House of Commons, it was said 
 that so great was its intricacy that only three 
 men understood it Mr. Gladstone himself, his 
 Attorney- General for Ireland, and Mr. T. ^l. 
 Healy. In preparing a bill no man could be 
 more painstaking. He settled and laid down the 
 principles himself; and when he came to work them 
 out with the draughtsman and the officials who had 
 special knowledge of the subject, he insisted on 
 knowing what their effect would be in every 
 particular. Indeed, he loved work for its own 
 sake, in this respect unlike Mr. Bright, who once 
 said to me with a smile, when asked as to his 
 methods of working, that he had never done any 
 work all his life. The v;ilue of this mastery of 
 details was seen when a bill came to be debated 
 in Committee. It was impossible to catch Mr. 
 Gladstone tripping on a point of fact, or unpre- 
 pared with a reply to the arguments of an 
 opponent. He seemed to revel in the toil ot 
 mastering a tangle of technical details. 
 
 It is long since iMiglaiul, in this respect not 
 favoured by her parliamentary system, has pro-
 
 444 Biographical Studies 
 
 duced a great foreign minister, nor has that title 
 been claimed for Mr. Gladstone. But he showed 
 on several occasions both his independence of 
 tradition and his faith in broad principles as fit 
 to be applied in international relations ; and his 
 action in that field, though felt only at intervals, 
 has left abiding results in European history. In 
 1 85 1, he being then still a Tory, his pamphlet 
 denouncing the cruelties of the Bourbon govern- 
 ment of Naples, and the sympathy he subse- 
 quently avowed with the national movement in 
 Italy, gave that movement a new standing in 
 Europe by powerfully recommending it to English 
 opinion. In 1870 the prompt action of his ministry 
 in arranging a treaty for the neutrality of Belgium 
 on the outbreak of the war between France and 
 Germany, averted the risk that Belgium might 
 be drawn into the strife. In 1 871, by concluding 
 the treaty of Washington, which provided for the 
 settlement by arbitration of the Alabama claims, 
 he not only set a precedent full of promise for 
 the future, but delivered England from what 
 would have been, in case of her being at war with 
 any European power, a danger fatal to her ocean 
 commerce. And, in 1876, his onslaught upon the 
 Turks, after the Bulgarian massacres, roused an 
 intense feeling in England, turning the current of 
 opinion so decisively that Disraeli's ministry were 
 forced to leave the Sultan to his fate, and thus 
 became a cause of the ultimate deliverance of
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 445 
 
 Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia, Bosnia, and Thessaly 
 from Mussulman tyranny. Few English statesmen 
 have equally earned the gratitude of the oppressed. 
 Nothing lay nearer to his heart than the pro- 
 tection of the Christians of the East. His sense 
 of personal duty to them was partly due to the 
 feeling that the Crimean War had prolonged the 
 rule of the Turk, and had thus imposed a special 
 responsibility on Britain, and on the members 
 of Lord Aberdeen's cabinet which drifted into 
 that war. Twenty years after the agitation ot 
 1876, and when he had finally retired from 
 Parliament and political life, the massacres per- 
 petrated by the Sultan on his Armenian subjects 
 brought him once more into the field, and 
 his last speech in public (delivered at Liverpool 
 in the autumn of 1896) was a powerful argument 
 in favour of British intervention to rescue the 
 Eastern Christians. The passion with which he 
 wrote and spoke to me on this subject would 
 have convinced me, had I needed to be convinced, 
 that the action he had taken in 1S76, then attri- 
 buted by his opponents to mere party spirit, 
 sprang from a disinterested devotion to justice 
 and mercy. In the following spring he followed 
 this up by a pamphlet on behalf of the freedom 
 of Crete. In neither of these two cases did 
 success crown his efforts, for the Government, 
 commanding a large majority in Parliament, 
 pursued the course upon which it had already
 
 44^ Biographical Studies 
 
 entered. Poignant regrets were expressed that 
 Mr. Gladstone was no longer able to take effective 
 action in the cause of humanity ; yet it was a con- 
 solation to be assured that age and infirmity had 
 not dulled his sympathies with that cause. 
 
 That he was right in 1876-78 in the view 
 he took of the line of conduct England should 
 adopt towards the Turks has been now virtually 
 admitted even by his opponents. That he was 
 also right in 1896, when urging action to protect 
 the Eastern Christians, will probably be admitted 
 ten years hence, when the facts of the case and 
 the nature of the opportunity that existed for 
 taking prompt action without the risk of a 
 European war have become better known. In 
 both cases it was not merely religious sympathy, 
 but also a far-sighted view of policy that governed 
 his judgment. He held that the faults of Turkish 
 rule are incurable, and that the Powers of Western 
 and Central Europe ought to aim at protecting 
 the subject nationalities and by degrees extend- 
 ing self-government to them, so that they may 
 grow into states, and in time be able to restore 
 prosperity to regions ruined by long misgovern- 
 ment, while constituting an effective barrier to 
 the advance of Russia, The jealousies of the 
 Powers throw obstacles in the way of this policy, 
 but it is a safe policy for England, and offers the 
 best hope for the peoples of the East, 
 
 The facts just noted prove that he possessed
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 447 
 
 and exerted a capacity for initiative in foreign as 
 well as in domestic affairs. In the Neapolitan case, 
 in the Alabama case, in the Bulgarian case, he 
 acted from his own convictions, with no previous 
 suggestion of encouragement from his party ; and 
 in the last-mentioned instance he took a course 
 which did not at the moment promise any political 
 gain, and which seemed to the English political 
 world so novel and even startling that no ordinary 
 statesman would have ventured on it. 
 
 His courage was indeed one of the most 
 striking parts of the man.^ It was not the rash- 
 ness of an impetuous nature, for, impetuous as 
 he was when stirred by some sudden excitement, 
 he showed an Ulyssean caution whenever he took a 
 deliberate survey of the conditions that surrounded 
 him. It was the proud self-confidence of a strong 
 character, which was willing to risk fame and 
 fortune in pursuing a course it had once resolved 
 upon ; a character which had faith in its own 
 conclusions, and in the success of a cause conse- 
 crated by principle ; a character which obstacles 
 did not affright, but rather roused to a higher 
 combative energy, b'ew English statesmen have 
 done anything so bold as was Mr. ("dadstonc^'s 
 
 ' His physical courage \va> im less evident than hi- nuTal. I'nr two 
 or three years his life was tl'.reaieiied, and j"ilicenuii were idd i>tt lo 
 guard him wherever he went. He di>liivtd this pri'iectiMU -.1 nuicli 
 (though the Home Ot'tire thought it iiei-es^ary 1 that he us<-d toescajie ti..m 
 the House of Commons l.y a little-Ire juented exit, give ilie ['li>-(Mnen the 
 slip, and stroll home to his residence along the Thame- I'ml'ankinent in 
 the small hours of the morning. l''ear was not in liis Tiature,
 
 44 8 Biographical Studies 
 
 declaration for Irish Home Rule in 1886. He 
 took not only his political power but the fame 
 and credit of his whole past life in his hand when 
 he set out on this new journey at seventy-seven 
 years of age ; for it was quite possible that the 
 great bulk of his party might refuse to follow 
 him, and he be left exposed to derision as the 
 chief of an insignificant group. As it happened, 
 the bulk of the party did follow him, though 
 many of the most influential refused to do so. 
 But neither he nor any one else could have fore- 
 told this when his intentions were first announced. 
 
 We may now, before passing away from the 
 public side of Mr. Gladstone's career, return 
 for a moment to the opposite views of his 
 character which were indicated some pages back. 
 He was accused of sophistry, of unwisdom, of 
 want of patriotism, of lust for power. Though it 
 is difficult to sift these charges without discussing 
 the conduct which gave rise to them, a task impos- 
 sible here, each of them must be briefly examined. 
 
 The first charge is the most plausible. His in- 
 genuity in discovering arguments and stating fine 
 verbal distinctions, his subtlety in discriminating 
 between views or courses apparently similar, were 
 excessive, and invited misconstruction. He had a 
 tendency to persuade himself, quite unconsciously, 
 that the course he desired to take was a course 
 which the public interest required. His acuteness 
 soon found reasons for that course ; the warmth
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 449 
 
 of his emotions c:n forced the reasons. It was a 
 dangerous tendency, but it does not impeach his 
 honesty of purpose, for the intluence which his 
 predilections unconsciously exerted upon his 
 judgment appeared also in his theological and 
 literary inquiries. I can recall no instance; in 
 which he wilfully misstated a fact, or simulated a 
 feeling, or used an argument which he knew to be 
 unsound, or resorted to that familiar device of the 
 common sort of debaters, the wilful misrepresenta- 
 tion of an opponent's words. He did not, as does 
 the sophist, attempt " to m^ike the worse appear 
 the better reason." 
 
 His wisdom will be differently judged by 
 those who condemn or approve the chief acts of 
 his policy. But it deserves to be noted that all 
 the legislation he passed, even the measures 
 which, like the Irish Church Disestablishment 
 Bill, exposed him to angry attacks at the time, 
 have now been approved by the all but unani- 
 mous judgment of iMiglishmen.' The same 
 may be said of two acts which brought much 
 invective upon him his settlement ot the 
 Alabania claims, one of the wisest strok(;s ot 
 foreign policy ever accomplished by a i5riiish 
 minister, and his protest against a support ot the 
 Turks in and afte,r 1876. I i)ass by Irish 1 lome 
 
 ' Thr laU' I'n tc^tant Arclil.ishop <A Dulilin ^.li.l ih.il ni>osM! li>iinKtU 
 had proval a hlc^siii- io his Church ; ;'.nd ihis wduKl sccin to ho now the 
 general \icw of \x\^\\ l'r()tc>tanl>. 
 
 2 c;
 
 45 o Biographical Studies 
 
 Rule, because the wisdom of the course he took 
 must be tested by results that are yet unborn, 
 as I pass by his Egyptian policy in 1882-85, 
 because it cannot be fairly judged till the facts 
 have been fully made public. He may be open 
 to blame for his participation in the Crimean War, 
 for his mistaken view of the American Civil War, 
 for his neglect of the Transvaal question when 
 he took office in 1880, and for his omission during 
 his earlier career to recognise the gravity of Irish 
 disaffection and to study its causes. I have heard 
 him lament that he had not twenty years earlier 
 given the same attention to that abiding source of 
 the difficulties of England which he gave from 1866 
 onwards. If in these instances he erred, it must be 
 remembered that he erred in company with nine- 
 tenths of British statesmen in both political parties. 
 Their admiration did not prevent his friends 
 from noting tendencies which sometimes led him 
 to miscalculate the forces he had to deal with. 
 Being, like the younger Pitt, extremely sanguine, 
 he was prone to underrate difficulties. Hopeful- 
 ness is a splendid quality. It is both the child 
 and the parent of faith. Without it neither Mr. 
 Pitt nor Mr. Gladstone could have done what they 
 did. But it disposes its possessor not sufficiently 
 to allow for the dulness or the prejudice of others. 
 So too the intensity of Mr, Gladstone's own feeling 
 made him fail to realise how many of his fellow- 
 countrymen did not know of, or were not shocked
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 45 i 
 
 by, acts of cruelty and injustice which had roused 
 his indignation. If his hatred of ostentation 
 suffered him to perceive that a nation, how- 
 ever well assured of the reality of its power 
 and influence in the world, may also desire that 
 this power and influence should be asserted and 
 proclaimed to other nations, he refused to humour 
 that desire. He had a contempt for what is 
 called " playing to the gallery," with a deep sense 
 of the danger of stimulating the passions which 
 lead to aggression and w^ar. To national honour, 
 as he conceived it, national righteousness was vital. 
 His spirit was that of Lowell's lines 
 
 I love my country so as only tiiey 
 
 Who love a mother fit to die for may. 
 
 I love her old renown, her ancient fame : 
 
 What better proof than that I loathe her shame r 
 
 It was this attitude that brought on him the 
 charge of wanting patriotism, a charge; first. I think, 
 insinuated at the time of the .4laba))ia arl)itraiion, 
 renewed when in 1876 he was accused of l)t:fri(,-nd- 
 ing Russia and neglecting '' British interests," and 
 sedulously repeated thereafter, akhotigh in those 
 two instances the result had prov(xl him right. 
 There was this much to give a kind of colour to 
 the charge, that he had scruptilously, j)erhaps too 
 scrupulotisly, refrained fVom extolling the material 
 power of England, preferring to insist upon her 
 responsibilities ; that he was known to regret the 
 constant increaseof naval and military expenditure.
 
 452 Biographical Studies 
 
 and that he had several times taken a course 
 which honour and prudence seemed to him to 
 recommend, but which had offended the patriots 
 of the music-halls. But it was an unjust charge, 
 for no man had a warmer pride in England, a 
 higher sense of her greatness and her mission. 
 
 Was he too fond of power ? Like other 
 strong men, he enjoyed it.^ That to secure it 
 he ever either adopted or renounced an opinion, 
 those who understood and watched the workings 
 of his mind could not believe. He was not only 
 too conscientious, but too proud to forego any of 
 his convictions, and there were not a few occasions 
 when he took a course which considerations of 
 personal interest would have forbidden. He did 
 not love office, feeling himself happier without its 
 cares, and when he accepted it did so, I think, in 
 the belief that there was work to be done which 
 it was laid upon him individually to do. His 
 changes sprang naturally from the development of 
 his own ideas or (as in the case of his Irish policy) 
 from the teaching of facts. He sometimes so far 
 yielded to his colleagues as to sanction steps which 
 he thought not the best, and may in this have 
 sometimes erred ; yet compromises are unavoid- 
 able, for no Cabinet could be kept together if its 
 
 1 His abdication of leadership in 1875 was meant to be final, though 
 when the urgency of Eastern affairs had drawn him back into strife, the 
 old ardour revived, and he resumed the place of I'rime Minister in iSSo. 
 It has been often said that he would have done better to retire from public 
 life in 1880, or in 18S5, yet the most striking pi'oofs both of his C(.)urage 
 and of his physical energy were given in the latest part of his career.
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 453 
 
 members did not now and then, in matters not 
 essential, yield to one another. When all the facts 
 of his life come to be known, instances may be dis- 
 closed in which he was the victim of his own casu- 
 istry or of his deference to l^eel's maxim that a 
 minister should not avow a change of \-iew until 
 the time has come to give effect to it. Pnit it will 
 also be made clear that he strove to obey his con- 
 science, that he acted with an ever-present sense 
 of his responsibility to the Almighty, and th;u he 
 was animated by an unselfish enthusiasm for 
 humanity, enlightenment, and freedom. 
 
 Whether he was a good judge of men was 
 a question much discussed among his friends. 
 With all his astuteness, he was in some ways 
 curiously simple ; with all his caution, he was by 
 nature unsuspicious, disposed to treat all men as 
 honest till they gave him strong reasons for think- 
 ing otherwise. Those who [)rotessed sympathy 
 with his views and aims sometimes succ<*(-ded 
 in inspiring more confidence than tht'y deserved. 
 But where this perturbing intluenc(; was absent 
 he showed plenty of insight, and would pass 
 shrewd judgments on the politicians around him. 
 permitting neither their b(,:ha\iour towards him- 
 self nor his opinion of th<Mr moral character to 
 affect his estimat(^ of th(Mr talents. in making 
 appointments in the Civil Service, or in tlu; 
 Established Church, he rose to a far higher 
 standard of public duty than rahnersti)n (ir
 
 454 Biographical Studies 
 
 Disraeli had reached or cared to reach, taking 
 great pains to find the fittest men, and giving 
 little weight to political considerations/ 
 
 His public demeanour, and especially his 
 excitability and vehemence of speech, made 
 people attribute to him an overbearing disposi- 
 tion and an irritable temper. In private one did 
 not find these faults. Masterful he certainly 
 was, both in speech and in action. His ardent 
 manner, the intensity of his look, the dialectical 
 vigour with which he pressed an argument, were 
 apt to awe people who knew him but slightly, 
 and make them abandon resistance. A gifted 
 though somewhat erratic politician of long bygone 
 days told me how he once fared when he had risen 
 in the House of Commons to censure some act of 
 his leader. " I had not gone on three minutes 
 when Gladstone turned round and gazed at me 
 so that I had to sit down in the middle of a 
 sentence. I could not help it. There was no 
 standing his eye." But he neither meant nor 
 wished to beat down his opponents by mere 
 authority. One who knew him as few people 
 did observed to me, " When you are arguing 
 with Mr. Gladstone, you must never let him 
 think he has convinced you unless you are really 
 convinced. Persist in repeating your view, and 
 if you are unable to cope with him in skill of 
 
 ^ For instance, he recommended Dr. Stubbs for a bishopric and Sir 
 John liolker for a lord justiceship, knowing both of tliem to be Tories.
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 455 
 
 fence, say bluntly that for all his ingenuity and 
 authority you think he is wrong, and you retain 
 your own opinion. If he respects you as a man 
 who knows something of the subject, lu; will be 
 impressed by your opinion, and it will afterwards 
 have due weight w-ith him." In his own Cabinet 
 he was willing to listen patiently to everybody's 
 views, and, indeed, in the judgment of some of 
 his colleagues, was not, at least in his later 
 years, sufficiently strenuous in asserting and 
 holding to his own. It is no secret that some 
 of the most important decisions of the ministry 
 of 1880-85 were taken against his judgment, 
 though, when they had been adopted, he was, of 
 course, bound to defend them in Parliament as if 
 they had received his individual approval. Nor, 
 though tenacious, did he bear malice against those 
 who had baftled him. He would exert his full 
 force to get his c^wn way, but ii he could not 
 get it, accepted the position with good tempeT.^ 
 He w'as too proud to be vindiciix'e. to(^ com- 
 pletely master of himself to be betrayc;d into 
 angry words. Impatient he might sometimes 
 be imder n. nervous strain, but nc^ver rude' or 
 rough. It was less easy to detc^rmine whether 
 he was overmindful of injuries, but those \\h() 
 had watched him most clos(;lv held that me-re 
 
 ' His respect and rcL;aril l^r Mr. l'>iii;hi wen- ciitiu-ly un.itlntcil tiy tl.c 
 fact thai Mr. ]'.ri_L;ht"s opposiiiun to the Il..nic Kule Hiil ><( iSSi, ha.j 1 rvv. 
 the chief cause of its defeat.
 
 45 6 Biographical Studies 
 
 opposition or even insult did not leave a per- 
 manent sting, and that the only thing he could 
 not forget or forgive was faithlessness. Himself 
 a model of loyalty to his colleagues, he followed 
 his favourite poet in consigning the traditori 
 to the lowest pit, although, like all statesmen, 
 he often found himself obliged to work with 
 those whom he distrusted. 
 
 He was less sensitive than Peel, as appeared 
 from his attitude toward his two chief opponents. 
 Disraeli's attacks did not seem to gall him, 
 perhaps because, although he recognised the 
 ability and admired the courage of his adversary, 
 he did not respect Disraeli's character, remem- 
 bering his behaviour to Peel, and thinking him 
 habitually untruthful. Yet he never attacked 
 Disraeli personally. There was another of his 
 opponents of whom he entertained a specially 
 unfavourable opinion, but no one could have 
 told from his speeches what that opinion was. 
 Against Lord Salisbury, his chief antagonist 
 from 1 88 1 onwards, he showed no resentment, 
 though Lord Salisbury had more than once 
 spoken discourteously of him. In 1890 he re- 
 marked to me apropos of some attack, " I have 
 never felt angry at what Salisbury has said about 
 me. His mother was very kind to me when I 
 was quite a young man, and I remember Salis- 
 bury as a little fellow in a red frock rolling about 
 on the ottoman."
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 457 
 
 That his temper was naturally hot. no one 
 who looked at him could doubt. But he had it 
 in such tight control, and it was so free from 
 anything acrid or malignant, that it had become 
 a good temper, worthy of a fme nature. However 
 vehement his expressions, they did not wound 
 or humiliate, and those younger men who had to 
 deal with him were not afraid of a sharj) answer or 
 an impatient repulse. He was cast in too large 
 a mould to have the pettiness of rufiled vanity 
 or to abuse his predominance by treating any 
 one as an inferior. His manners were the 
 manners of the old time, easy but stately. Like 
 his oratory, they were in what ^Matthew Arnold 
 used to call the grand style ; and the contrast in 
 this respect between hini and some ot thi^se 
 who crossed swords with him in literary or 
 theological controversy was a[)parent. His in- 
 tellectual generosity was a ])art of the same 
 largeness of nature. He cordially acknowledged 
 his indebtedness to those who helped him in 
 any piece of work, receiv(,;d their suggestions 
 candidly, even when opposed to his own precon- 
 ceived notions, did not hesitate to con less a 
 mistake. Those who know the abundance ol 
 their resources, and have coiKjuercd tame, can 
 doubtless afford to be g(MU'roiis. Julius Crsar 
 was, and George WashingKMi, and so, in a 
 different sphere, were Isaac Xcwton and Charles 
 Darwin. ])Ut the instances to the contrary are
 
 45 8 Biographical Studies 
 
 so numerous that one may say of magnanimity 
 that it is among the rarest as well as the finest 
 ornaments of character. 
 
 The essential dignity of Mr. Gladstone's nature 
 was never better seen than during the last few 
 years of his life, after he had finally retired 
 (in 1894) from public life. He indulged in no 
 vain regrets, nor was there any foundation for 
 the rumours, so often circulated, that he thought 
 of re-entering the arena of strife. He spoke 
 with no bitterness of those who had opposed, 
 and sometimes foiled, him in the past. He 
 gave vent to no criticisms of those who from 
 time to time filled the place that had been 
 his in the government of the country or the 
 leadership of his party. Although his opinion 
 on current questions was frequently solicited, he 
 scarcely ever allowed it to be known, lest it 
 should embarrass his successors in the leadership 
 of the party, and never himself addressed the 
 nation, except (as already mentioned) on behalf 
 of what he deemed a sacred cause, altogether 
 above party -the discharge by Britain of her 
 duty to the victims of the Turk. As soon as an 
 operation for cataract had enabled him to resume 
 his habit of working for seven hours a day, he 
 devoted himself with his old ardour to the pre- 
 paration of an edition of Bishop Butler's works, 
 resumed his multifarious reading, planned (as 
 he told me in 1896) a treatise on the Olympian
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 4.59 
 
 religion, and filled up the interstices of his work- 
 ing-time with studies on Homer which he had been 
 previously unable to complete. No trace of the 
 moroseness of old age appeared in his manners or 
 his conversation, nor did he, though profoundly 
 grieved at some of the events which he witnessed, 
 and owning himself disappointed at the slow ad- 
 vance made by a cause dear to him, appear less 
 hopeful than in earlier days of the general pro- 
 gress of the world, or less confident in the bene- 
 ficent power of freedom to promote the happiness 
 of his country. The stately simplicity which had 
 always charmed those who saw him in private, 
 seemed more beautiful than ever in this quiet 
 evening of a long and sultry day. His intellec- 
 tual powers were unimpaired, his thirst for know- 
 ledge undiminished. But a placid stillness had 
 fallen upon him and his household ; and in seeing 
 the tide of his life begin slowl\" to ebb, one 
 thought of the lines of his illustrious cont('m[)orary 
 and friend : 
 
 Such a lidc as movin^^ sccnis aslocii. 
 Too full for soutul aud loam, 
 When that which drew from out the 1i()uih11css d.eej) 
 Turns again home. 
 
 Adding to his grace of manner a memory 
 of extraordinary strength and cpnckness and an 
 amazing vivacity and variety of mental iorce, any 
 one can understand how fascinating Mr. ( dad- 
 stone was in society. He enjoyed ii to the last.
 
 460 Biographical Studies 
 
 talking as earnestly and joyously at eighty-seven as 
 he had done at twenty on every topic that came 
 up, and exerting himself with equal zest whether 
 his interlocutor was an archbishop or a youthful 
 curate. Though his party used to think that he 
 overvalued the political influence of the great 
 families, allotting them rather more than their share 
 of honours and appointments, no one was person- 
 ally more free from that taint of snobbishness 
 which is frequently charged upon Englishmen. 
 He gave the best he had to everybody alike, 
 paying to men of learning and letters a respect 
 which in England they seldom receive from the 
 magnates who lead society. And although he 
 was scrupulously observant of the rules of pre- 
 cedence and conventions of social life, it was 
 easy to see that neither rank nor wealth had 
 that importance in his eyes which the latter 
 nowadays commands. Dispensing titles and 
 decorations with a liberal hand, his pride always 
 refused such so-called honours for himself. 
 
 It was often said of him that he lacked 
 humour ; but this was only so far true that he 
 was apt to throw into small matters more force 
 and moral earnestness than were needed, and to 
 honour with a refutation opponents whom a 
 little light sarcasm would have better reduced 
 to their insignificance.^ In private he was wont 
 
 1 Usually over-anxious to vindicate his own consistency, he showed on 
 one occasion a capacity for recognising the humorous side of a position
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 461 
 
 both to ttill and to enjoy good stories ; while 
 in ParHament, though his tone was g(;nerally 
 earnest, he could display such effective powers 
 of banter and ridicule as to make people 
 wonder why they were so rarely put forth. 
 Much of what passes in London for humour 
 is mere cynicism, and he hated cynicism so 
 heartily as to dislike even humour when it 
 had a cynical tlavour. Wit he enjoyed, but 
 did not produce. The turn of his mind was 
 not to brevity, point, and condensation. Me 
 sometimes struck off a telling phrase, but seldom 
 polished an epigram. His conversation was 
 luminous rather than sparkling ; you were 
 interested and instructed v/hile you listened, 
 but it was not so much the phrases as the 
 general effect that dwelt in your nu-mory. 
 An acute observer once said to me that Mr. 
 Gladstone showed in argument a knack ot hitting 
 the nail not quite on the h(;ad. The criticism 
 was so far just that he was less certain to go 
 straip-ht to the vital issue in a c()nlro\-ersv than 
 one expected from his force and keenness. 
 
 After the tleath of Thomas CarlyK- he- was 
 
 intM whic!; lie had ln-cii l)i..u_L;in. In a ^!^l^^;< uhi^li ,.i--r m iSoi 
 frcquciU references lia.l been made li> a :^ .naer -ju eel; in ui.ieli he li.ui 
 lironniuice.l a hit^hly-cwloine.l iane.;yric w.nw l!;e ('!i;:i,l! d 1 j::-.! uai n. 
 Wales, the (li.-.estali!i-hnienl nt whiiii lif had -.ih-e>;:a'n! iy ieii-nic wilhr.- 
 tn Mippi.n. lie replied, " Many irleren-e. iia\e i.<eii ii.adr M a !..in.e; 
 speech of mine "U ihi^Mihied, ;uai 1 am :. : pi'-; ': ; : d- ny ;1'. !'. \v. ih.-.i 
 speech, when closely srriinn;M-d, there may appe u t.i i>e : i.-,en- m .m< 
 element of exa-i;erati.in." Tiie ll<ni^e d.i^vdve: in l.i::-!iiei, .mi ;. 
 farther reference \va> ma le to the i.ldi -jieecii.
 
 462 Biographical Studies 
 
 probably the best talker in London, and a talker 
 in one respect more agreeable than either Carlyle 
 or Macaulay, inasmuch as he was no less ready 
 to listen than to speak, and never wearied the 
 dinner- table by a monologue. His simplicity, 
 his spontaneity, his geniality and courtesy, as well 
 as the fund of knowledge and of personal recol- 
 lections at his command, made him so popular 
 in society that his opponents used to say it was 
 dangerous to meet him, because one might be 
 forced to leave off hating him. He was, per- 
 haps, too prone to go on talking upon the 
 subject which filled his mind at the moment ; 
 nor was it easy to divert his attention to some- 
 thing else which others might deem more im- 
 portant.-^ Those who stayed with him in the 
 same country house sometimes complained that 
 the perpetual display of force and eagerness 
 tired them, as one tires of watching the rush 
 of Niagara. His guests, however, did not feel 
 this, for his own home life was quiet and smooth. 
 He read and wrote a good many hours daily, but 
 never sat up late, almost always slept soundly, 
 never seemed oppressed or driven to strain 
 his strength. With all his impetuosity, he 
 
 ^ Ilis Oxford contemporarj' and friend, the late Mr. Milnes Gaskell, told 
 me that when Mr. Gladstone was undergoing his viva voce examination for 
 his degree, the examiner, satisfied with the candidate's answers on a par- 
 ticular matter, said, "And now, Mr. Gladstone, we will leave that part 
 of the subject." " No," replied the examinee, " we will, if you please, not 
 leave it yet." Whereupon he proceeded to pour forth a further flood of 
 knowledge and disquisition.
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 463 
 
 was regular, systematic, and deliberate in his 
 habits and ways of doing business. A swift 
 reader and a surprisingly swift writer, he was 
 always occupied, and was skilful in using even 
 the scraps and fragments of his time. No i)res- 
 sure of work made him fussy, nor could any one 
 remember to have seen him in a hurry. 
 
 The best proof of his swiftness, industry, and 
 skill in economising time is supplied ])v the 
 quantity of his literary work, which, consider- 
 ing the abstruse nature of the subjects to which 
 much of it is related, would have been credit- 
 able to the diligence of a German professor 
 sitting alone in his study. The merits of the 
 work have been disputed. Mankind are slow to 
 credit the same person with eminence in various 
 fields. When they read the prose of a great 
 poet, they try it by severer tests than would be 
 applied to other writers. When a jxiiiiter has 
 won credit by his landscapes or his cattle; pieces, 
 he is seldom encouraged to venture into other 
 lines. So Mr. Gladstone's re[)utation as an 
 orator stood in his own light wlum hr ap- 
 peared as an author. lie was reatl l)\- thou- 
 sands who would not have looked at the article 
 or book had it borne some othc^r name ; but Ik; 
 was judged by the standard, not of his finest 
 [printed speeches, for his speeclies were seldom 
 models of composition, but rather by the impres- 
 sion which his tinest si)eeches made; on those
 
 464 Biographical Studies 
 
 who heard them. Since his warmest admirers 
 could not claim for him as a writer of prose any 
 such pre-eminence as belonged to him as a 
 speaker, it followed that his written work was 
 not duly appreciated. Had he been a writer and 
 nothing else, he would have been eminent and 
 powerful by his pen. 
 
 He might, however, have failed to secure a place 
 in the front rank. His style was forcible, copious, 
 rich with various knowledge, warm with the 
 ardour of his temperament. But it suffered from 
 an inborn tendency to exuberance which the long 
 practice of oratory had confirmed. It was diffuse, 
 apt to pursue a topic into details, when these might 
 have been left to the reader's own reflection. It 
 was redundant, employing more words than were 
 needed to convey the substance. It was un- 
 chastened, indulging too freely in tropes and 
 metaphors, in quotations and adapted phrases 
 even when the quotation added nothing to the 
 sense, but was suggested merely by some associa- 
 tion in his own mind. Thus it seldom reached 
 a high level of purity and grace, and though one 
 might excuse the faults as natural to the work 
 of a swift and busy man, they were sufficient 
 to reduce the pleasure to be derived from the 
 form and dress of his thoughts. Nevertheless 
 there are not a few passages of rare merit, 
 both in the books and in the articles, among 
 which may be cited (not as exceptionally good,
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 465 
 
 but as typical of his strong points) the strik- 
 ing picture of his own youthful feeling toward 
 the Church of England contained in the Chapter 
 of AtUobiography, and the refined criticism of 
 Robert E/smere, published in 1808. Almost 
 the last thing he wrote, a pamphlet on the 
 Greek and Cretan question, published in the 
 spring of 1897, has the force and cogency of his 
 best days. Two things were never wanting to 
 him : vigour of expression and an admirable 
 command of appropriate words. 
 
 His writings fall into three classes : political, 
 theological, and literary the last chiefly con- 
 sisting of his books and articles upon Homer 
 and the Homeric question. All the political 
 writings, except the books on T/ie State in its 
 Relations to the Ckurc/i and Church Py^inciples 
 considered in their Results, belong to the class 
 of occasional literature, being pamphlets or 
 articles produced with a view to some cur- 
 rent crisis or controversy. They are valuable 
 chiefly as proceeding from one who l)ore a 
 leading part in the afiairs they relate to, and 
 as embodying vividly the opinions and aspira- 
 tions of the moment, less frequently in res[jecl 
 of permanent lessons of political wisdom, such 
 as one finds in Machiavelli or Toc(}U(;vill(,' or 
 Edmund Burke. Like Pitt and Peel. Mr. Clad- 
 stone had a mind which, whatever its original 
 
 tendencies, had come to be ratlicr practical than 
 
 2 II
 
 466 Biographical Studies 
 
 meditative. He was fond of generalisations and 
 principles, but they were always directly related 
 to the questions that came before him in actual 
 politics ; and the number of weighty maxims or 
 illuminative suggestions to be found in his writ- 
 ings and speeches is small in proportion to the, 
 sustained vigour they display. Even Disraeli, 
 though his views were often fanciful and his 
 epigrams often forced, gives us more frequently 
 a brilliant (if only half true) historical aperfu, or 
 throws a flash of light into some corner of human 
 character. Of the theological essays, which are 
 mainly apologetic and concerned with the authen- 
 ticity and authority of Scripture, it is enough to 
 say that they were the work of an accomplished 
 amateur, who had been too busy to follow the pro- 
 gress of critical inquiry. His Homeric treatises, 
 the most elaborate piece of work that proceeded 
 from Mr. Gladstone's pen, are in one sense worth- 
 less, in another sense admirable. Those parts of 
 them which deal with early Greek mythology, 
 genealogy, and religion, and, in a less degree, the 
 theories about Homeric geography and the use 
 of Homeric epithets, have been condemned by 
 the unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic. 
 The premises are assumed without sufficient in- 
 vestigation, while the reasonings are fine-drawn 
 and flimsy. Extraordinary ingenuity is shown 
 in piling up a lofty fabric, but the foundation is 
 of sand, and the edifice has hardly a solid wall
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 467 
 
 or beam in it. A conjecture is treated as a fact ; 
 then an inference, possible but not certain, is 
 drawn from this conjecture ; a second possible 
 inference is based upon the first ; and we are 
 made to forget that the probabiliiy of this second 
 is at most only half the probability of the first. 
 So the process goes on ; and when the super- 
 structure is complete, the reader is provoked 
 to perceive how much dialectical skill has been 
 wasted upon a series of hypotheses which a breath 
 of common-sense criticism dissipates. \^ one is 
 asked to explain the weakness in this particular 
 department of a mind otherwise so strong, the 
 answer would seem to be that the element of 
 fancifulness in Mr. Gladstone's intellect, and his 
 tendency to mistake mere argumentation for 
 verification, were checked in practical politics by 
 constant intercourse with friends and colleagues 
 as well as by the need of convincing visible 
 audiences, while in theological or historical in- 
 quiries his ingenuity roamed with latal frecdoni 
 over wide plains where no obstacles ch(;cked 
 its course. Something may also be due to the 
 fact that his philosophical and historical educa- 
 tion was received at a time when the modern 
 critical spirit and the canons it recognises had 
 scarcely begun to assert themselves at Oxlord. 
 Similar defects may be discerned in other eminent 
 writers of his own and the jjreceding gcMieration 
 of Oxford men, defects from which persons of
 
 468 Biographical Studies 
 
 inferior power in later days might be free. In 
 some of these writers, and particularly in Cardinal 
 Newman, the contrast between dialectical acumen, 
 coupled with surpassing rhetorical skill, and the 
 vitiation of the argument by a want of the critical 
 faculty, is scarcely less striking ; and the example 
 of that illustrious man suggests that the dominance 
 of the theological view of literary and historical 
 problems, a dominance evident in Mr. Gladstone, 
 counts for something in producing the phenomenon. 
 With these defects, Mr. Gladstone's Homeric 
 work had the merit of being based on a full 
 and thorough knowledge of the Homeric text. 
 He had seen, at a time when few people in 
 England had seen it, that the Homeric poems 
 are an historical source of the highest value, a 
 treasure-house of data for the study of early 
 Greek life and thought, an authority all the more 
 trustworthy because an unconscious authority, 
 addressing not posterity but contemporaries. 
 This mastery of the matter contained in the 
 poems enabled him to present valuable pictures 
 of the political and social life of Homeric Greece, 
 while the interspersed literary criticisms are often 
 subtle and suggestive, erring, when they do err, 
 chiefly through the over-earnestness of his mind. 
 He often takes the poet too seriously; reading 
 an ethical purpose into descriptive or dramatic 
 touches which are merely descriptive or dramatic. 
 Passages whose moral tendency offends him are
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 469 
 
 reprobated as later insertions with a naivete which 
 forgets the character oi" a primitive age. But he 
 has for his author not only that sympathy which is 
 the best basis for criticism, but a justness of poetic 
 taste which the learned and painstaking German 
 commentator frequently wants. That ]\Ir. Glad- 
 stone was a sound scholar in that narrower sense of 
 the word which denotes a grammatical and literary 
 command of Greek and Latin, goes without say- 
 ing. Men of his generation kept a closer hold 
 upon the ancient classics than we do to-day ; and 
 his habit of reading Greek for the sake of his 
 Homeric studies, and Latin for the sake of his 
 theological, made this familiarity more than 
 usually thorough. Like most Etonians, he loved 
 and knew the poets by preference. Dante was 
 his favourite poet, perhaps because Dante is the 
 most theological and ethical of the great poets, 
 and because the tongue and the memories ot Italy 
 had a peculiar attraction for him. He used to say 
 that he found Dante's thought incomparably in- 
 spiring, but hard to follow, it was so high and so 
 abstract. Theology claimed a place beside poetry ; 
 history came next, though he did not study it 
 systematically. It seemed odd that he was some- 
 times at fault in the constitutional anlicpiilics ol 
 England ; but this subject was. until llu; day ol 
 Dr. Stubbs, pre-eminently a Whig subject, and 
 Mr. Gladstone never was a Whig, never leaiaunl 
 to think upon the lines of the great Whigs of
 
 47 o Biographical Studies 
 
 former days. His historical knowledge was not 
 exceptionally wide, but it was generally accurate 
 in matters of fact, however fanciful he might be 
 in reasoning from the facts, however wild his 
 conjectures in the prehistoric region. I^n meta- 
 physics strictly so called his reading did not go 
 far beyond those companions of his youth, Aris- 
 totle and Bishop Butler ; and philosophical specu- 
 lation interested him only so far as it bore on 
 Christian doctrine. Keen as was his interest 
 in theology and in history, it is not certain that 
 he would have produced work of permanent 
 value in either sphere even had his life been 
 wholly devoted to study. His mind seemed to 
 need to be steadied, his ingenuity restrained, 
 by having to deal with concrete matter for a 
 practical end. Neither, in spite of his emin- 
 ence as a financier and an advocate of free 
 trade, did he show much taste for economic 
 studies. On practical topics, such as the work- 
 ing of protective tariffs, the abuse of charitable 
 endowments, the development of fruit-culture in 
 England, the duty of liberal giving by the rich, 
 the utility of thrift among the poor, his remarks 
 were full of point, clearness, and good sense, but 
 he seldom launched out into the wider sea of 
 economic theory. He took a first-class in mathe- 
 matics at Oxford, at the same time as his first 
 in classics, but did not pursue the subject in 
 later life. Regarding the sciences of experi-
 
 William Evvart Gladstone 47 1 
 
 ment and observation, he seemed to feel as little 
 curiosity as any educated man who notes the 
 enormous part they play in the modern world 
 can feel. Sayings of his have been quoted which 
 show that he imperfectly comprehended the char- 
 acter of the evidence they rely upon and of the 
 methods they employ. On one occasion he 
 horrified a dinner-table of younger friends by 
 refusing to accept some of the most certain conclu- 
 sions of modern geology. No doubt he belonged, 
 as Lord Derby (the Prime Minister) once said of 
 himself, to a pre-scientific age. Perhaps he was 
 unconsciously biassed by the notion that such 
 sciences as geology and biology, for instance, were 
 being used by some students to sap the founda- 
 tions ot revealed religion. But I can recall 
 no sign of disposition to dissuade free inquiry 
 either into those among the sciences of nature 
 which have been supposed to touch theology, or 
 into the date, authorship, and authority of the 
 books of the Bible. He had faith not only in his 
 creed, but in God as a God of truth, and in the 
 power of research to elicit truth. 
 
 General propositions are dangerous, yri it 
 seems safe to observe that great men have 
 seldom been obscurantists or persecutors. I'.iiher 
 the synipathy with intellectual cltort. which is 
 natural to a powerful intc^llcct, or th(; sense ih:u 
 free inquiry, though it may be checlonl by re- 
 pression for a certain tinie or within a ceriain
 
 47 2 Biographical Studies 
 
 area, will ultimately have its course, dissuades 
 them from that attempt to dam up the stream of 
 thought which smaller minds regard as the obvious 
 expedient for saving souls or institutions. 
 
 It ought to be added, for this was a remarkable 
 feature of his character, that he had the deepest 
 reverence for the great poets and philosophers, 
 placing the career of the statesman on a far lower 
 plane than that of those who rule the world by 
 their thoughts enshrined in literature. He ex- 
 pressed in a striking letter to Tennyson's eldest son 
 his sense of the immense superiority of the poet's 
 life and work. Once, in the lobby of the House 
 of Commons, seeing his countenance saddened by 
 the troubles of Ireland, I told him, in order to 
 divert his thoughts, how some one had recently 
 discovered that Dante had in his last years been 
 appointed at Ravenna to a lectureship which 
 raised him above the pinch of want. Mr. Glad- 
 stone's face lit up at once, and he said, " How 
 strange it is to think that these great souls whose 
 words are a beacon-light to all the generations 
 that have come after them, should have had 
 cares and anxieties to vex them in their daily 
 life, just like the rest of us common mortals." 
 The phrase reminded me that a few days before 
 I had heard Mr. Darwin, in dwelling upon the 
 pleasure a visit paid by Mr. Gladstone had 
 given him, say, " And he talked just as if he had 
 been an ordinary person like one of ourselves."
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 473 
 
 The two great men were alike unconscious of 
 their greatness. 
 
 It was an unspeakable benefit to Mr. Gladstone 
 that his love of letters and learning enabled hini 
 to find in the pursuit of knowledge a relief from 
 anxieties and a solace under disappointments. 
 Without some such relief his fiery and restless 
 spirit would have worn itself out. He lived two 
 lives the life of the statesman and the life of the 
 student, and passed swiftly from the one to the 
 other, dismissing when he sat down to his books 
 all the cares of politics. But he led a third 
 life also, the secret life of the soul. Religion 
 was of all things that which had the strongest 
 hold upon his thoughts and feelings. Nothing 
 but his father's opposition prevented him trom 
 becoming a clergyman when he (]uitted the Uni- 
 versity. Never thereafter did he cease to lake 
 the warmest interest in everything that attecied 
 the Christian Church. I le lost his seal for (.)\tord 
 University by the votes of the country clergy, 
 who formed the bulk of the constituency. Me in- 
 curred the displeasure of four-litths ol the Angli- 
 can communion by disestablishing llie Protestant 
 Episcopal Church in Ireland, and from iS()S to ilu; 
 end of his life found nearly all the clerical force 
 of the English establishment arrayed against him, 
 while his warmest support came trom the N(mi- 
 conformists of England and the I'resbytrrians ol 
 Scotland. Yet nothing alfected his devcHion to
 
 474 Biographical Studies 
 
 the Church in which he had been brought up, nor 
 to the body of Anglo-Catholic doctrine he had 
 imbibed as an undergraduate. After an attack 
 of influenza which had left him very weak in the 
 spring of 1891, he endangered his life by attend- 
 ing a meeting on behalf of the Colonial Bishoprics 
 Fund, for which he had spoken fifty years before. 
 His theological opinions tinged his views upon 
 political subjects. They filled him with dislike of 
 the legalisation of marriage with a deceased wife's 
 sister ; they made him a vehement opponent of 
 the bill which established the English Divorce 
 Court in 1857, and a watchfully hostile critic of 
 all divorce legislation in America afterwards. 
 Some of his friends traced to the same cause his 
 less than adequate appreciation of German litera- 
 ture (though he admired Goethe and Schiller) and 
 even his political coldness towards Prussia and 
 afterwards towards the German Empire. He 
 could not forget that Germany had been the 
 fountain of rationalism, while German Evangeli- 
 cal Protestantism was more schismatic and farther 
 removed from the mediaeval Catholic Church than 
 it pleased him to deem the Church of England to 
 be. He had an exceedingly high sense of the 
 duty of purity of life and of the sanctity of 
 domestic relations, and his rigid ideas of decorum 
 inspired so much awe that it used to be said to 
 a person who had told an anecdote with ever 
 so slight a tinge of impropriety, " How many
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 475 
 
 thousands of pounds would you take to t('ll that 
 to Gladstone?" When living in the country, it 
 was his practice to attend daily morning service 
 in the parish church, and on Sunday to read in 
 church the lessons for the day ; and he rarely, if 
 ever, transgressed his rule against Sunday labour. 
 Religious feeling, coupled with a system of firm 
 dogmatic beliefs, was the mainspring of his life, a 
 guiding light in perplexities, a source of strength 
 in adverse fortune, a consolation in sorrow, a 
 beacon of hope beyond the failures and disap- 
 pointments of this present world. He did noi 
 make what is commonly called a profession ot 
 religion, and talked little about it in general 
 society, although always ready to plunge into a 
 magazine controversy when Christianity was 
 assailed. But those who knew him best knew 
 that he was always referring current questions to, 
 and trying his own contluct by, a religious 
 standard. He believed in the efhcacy of i)rayer, 
 and sought through prayer for slrengih and tor 
 direction in the affairs of state. I le was a re- 
 markable example of the coexistence together 
 with a Christian virtue of a ([uality which 
 Catholic theologians treat as a mortal sin. lie 
 was an exceedingly pnMid man, yet an exceed- 
 ingly humble Christian. W'itli a high regard for 
 his own dignity and a sensiti\cness m any inipu 
 tation on his honour, ht^ was (U-eply conscious ot 
 his imperfections in the (^ye of i\n(\. realising the
 
 47 6 Biographical Studies 
 
 weakness and sinfulness of human nature with 
 a mediaeval intensity. The 'language of self- 
 depreciation he was wont to use, sometimes 
 deemed unreal, expressed his genuine sense of 
 the contrast between the religious ideal he set 
 up and his own attainment. And the tolerance 
 which he extended to those who attacked him 
 or who had (as he thought) behaved ill in public 
 life was largely due to this pervading sense of the 
 frailty of human character, and of the inextricable 
 mixture in conduct of good and bad motives. 
 " It is always best to take the charitable view," 
 he once observed when I had quoted to him the 
 saying of Dean Church that Mark Pattison had 
 painted himself too black in his autobiography 
 " always best," adding, with grim emphasis, 
 " especially in politics." 
 
 In this indulgent view, more evident in his 
 later years, and the more remarkable because 
 his expressions were often too vehement, there 
 was nothing of the cynical " man of the world " 
 acceptance of a low standard as the only possible 
 standard, for his moral earnestness was as fervent 
 at eighty-eight as it had been at thirty, and he 
 retained a simplicity and an unwillingness to sus- 
 pect sinister motives, singular in one who had 
 seen so much. Although accessible and frank in 
 the ordinary converse of society, he was in reality 
 a reserved man ; not shy, stiff, and externally 
 cold, like Peel, nor always standing on a pedestal
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 4-- 
 
 of dignity, like the younger Pitt, but revcalinj^^ 
 his deepest thoughts only to a few intinKiic 
 friends, and treating others with a couri<:ou.'^ 
 kindliness which, though it put them at their 
 ease, did not encourage them to approach nt-arcr. 
 Thus, while he was admired by th<,' mass of his 
 followers, and beloved by the small inner group 
 of family friends, the majority of his colleagues, 
 official subordinates, and political or ecclesiastical 
 associates, would have hesitated to give him anv of 
 friendship's confidences. Though quick to mark 
 and acknowledge good service, or to offer to a junior 
 an opportunity of distinction, many deemed him 
 too much occupied with his own thoughts to 
 show interest in his disciples, or to bestow those 
 counsels which a young man prizes from his 
 chief. But for the warmth of his devoti(Mi t(^ a 
 few early friends and the reverence he jxucl to 
 their memory, a reverence touchiiigly shown in 
 the article on Arthur Hallam which he jiublished 
 near the end of his own life, sixiy-ti\-e years after 
 Mallam's death, ther(r might ha\-e sf^emed in be 
 a measure of truth in the judgm<-nt that lie eareii 
 less for men than tor ideas ami causes. Those, 
 however, who marked the pang which ilv de- 
 parture to the Roman Church ot his Iriend I lope 
 Scott caused him, those wlio in later d.iys r.cned 
 the; enthusiasm with wliich he would speak ot 
 Lord Althorp, his opponent, .ami ot Lor>i Aber- 
 deen, his chief, tl welling upon the truihtuiness .in!
 
 478 Biographical Studies 
 
 uprightness of the former^ and the amiability of 
 the latter, knew that the impression of detach- 
 ment he gave wronged the sensibility of his own 
 heart. Of how few who have lived for more than 
 sixty years in the full sight of their countrymen, 
 and have been as party leaders exposed to angry 
 and sometimes spiteful criticism, can it be said 
 that there stands on record against them no 
 malignant word and no vindictive act ! This 
 was due not perhaps entirely to natural sweet- 
 ness of disposition, but rather to self-control 
 and to a certain largeness of soul which would 
 not condescend to anything mean or petty. 
 Pride, though it may be a sin, is to most of us a 
 useful, to some an indispensable, buttress of virtue. 
 Nor should it be forgotten that the perfectly happy 
 life which he led at home, cared for in everything 
 by a devoted wife, kept far from him those domestic 
 troubles which have soured the temper and em- 
 bittered the judgments of not a few famous men. 
 Reviewing his whole career, and summing up the 
 concurrent impressions and recollections of those 
 who knew him best, this dignity is the feature 
 which dwells most in the mind, as the outline of 
 some majestic Alp thrills one from afar when all 
 the lesser beauties of glen and wood, of crag and 
 glacier, have faded in the distance. As elevation 
 was the note of his oratory, so was magnanimity 
 the note of his character. 
 
 The Greek maxim that no one can be called
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 479 
 
 happy till his life is clostjd must, in the case of 
 statesmen, be extended to warn us from the 
 attempt to fix a man's place in history till a 
 generation has arisen to whom he is a mer<' 
 name, not a familiar figure to be loved or 
 hated. Few reputations made in ])olitics so far 
 retain their lustre that curiosity continut-s to 
 play round the person when those who can re- 
 member him living have departed. Dante has 
 in immortal stanzas contrasted the fame of Pro- 
 venzano Salvani that sounded through all Tuscany 
 while he lived with the faint whispers of his name 
 heard in his own Siena forty years after his death.' 
 So out of all the men who have held a foremost 
 place in English public life in the nineteenth 
 century there are but six or seven Piti, i'ox, 
 Wellington, Peel, Disraeli, jjossibly Canning, or 
 O'Connell, or Melljourne whose names art- tt)- 
 day upon our lips. The great jjoet or the great 
 artist lives as long as his books or his pictures ; 
 the statesman, like the singer or the actor, 
 begins to be forgotten so soon as his voice is 
 still, unless he has so dominated the men ot 
 his own time, and made himseli a part of his 
 country's history, that his personal character 
 is indissolubly linkeil t(^ the events tlu.- course 
 of which he h(;l[)ed to determine. Tried by 
 this test, ?vlr. C'dadstone's fame seems destined 
 to endure. His elocjue-nce will soon Ijecome 
 ' /'.-o,^'.::. X.. \< J !;:'>.
 
 480 Biographical Studies 
 
 merely a tradition, for his printed speeches do not 
 preserve its charm. If some of his books continue 
 to be read, it will be rather because they are his 
 than in respect of any permanent contribution they 
 have made to knowledge. The wisdom of his 
 policy, foreign and domestic, will have to be judged, 
 not only by the consequences we see, but also by 
 other consequences still hidden in the future. 
 Yet among his acts there are some with which 
 history cannot fail to concern herself, and which 
 will keep fresh the memory of their author's 
 energy and courage. Whoever follows the annals 
 of England during the memorable years from 1843 
 to 1894 will meet his name on almost every page, 
 will feel how great must have been the force of an 
 intellect that could so interpenetrate the story of 
 its time, and will seek to know something of 
 the dauntless figure that rose always conspicuous 
 above the struggling throng. 
 
 There is a passage in the Odyssey where the 
 seer Theoclymenus says, in describing a vision 
 of death : " The sun has perished out of heaven." 
 To Englishmen, Mr. Gladstone had been like a 
 sun which, sinking slowly, had grown larger as he 
 sank, and filled the sky with radiance even while 
 he trembled on the verge of the horizon. There 
 were men of ability and men of renown, but there 
 was no one comparable to him in fame and power 
 and honour. When he departed the light seemed 
 to have died out of the sky.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Acton, John Edward Enierich Dal- 
 berg-, Lord 
 
 career of, 382-84 
 
 characteristics of, 399 
 
 critical taste of, 390 
 
 family of, 382 
 
 history, view of, 391-92 ; view of 
 study of, 394-95 
 
 learning of, 386-89, 392 
 
 liberty, history of, projected by, 
 395-96 
 
 libraries of, 388-89 and note 
 
 political opinions of, 384 
 
 style of, 396-97 
 
 thoroughness of, 390, 393-95 
 
 University work of, 397-98 
 
 writings of, 395 
 American Ci\il W'ar, 55, 57, 90 and 
 
 note. ^SVc' (ilso L'nitul State,. 
 Arnold, Dr., 343, 346 
 Austen, Jane, 127 
 
 I'eaconsfield, Benjiiniin Disraeli, 
 
 Lor<l 
 Cairns valued by, 1^6-87 
 career of, 3-16 
 characteristics of 
 
 anil)ition, 21-22, 2''), 30-31 
 
 bon'jomir, 32, 34 
 
 courage, 11, 25-26, 65 
 
 cynicism, 30, 40-4 i 
 
 debating power, 47 
 
 intellectual coiigruity, 35-38, 
 
 42 
 
 loyalty, 33 
 
 self-cnilidence, 21, 26. 50, ('>5, 
 224 
 
 tactical adroitness, 48-50 
 
 tenacity, 11, 15, 23-2,1, 'o, ' :; 
 i-;aster!i policy c^f, i,[o, 275 -'), 
 
 300, 3^6 
 education nf, yi 
 epigranunatic phrases of, 41- ;" 
 
 Beaconsfield, Lord 
 
 estimates regarding, 1-2 ; foreign, 
 
 54. 58 
 fmiily of, 3 
 Gladstone compared \\ith, 418, 
 
 429, 466 ; contrasted uith, 422 ; 
 
 (jladstone's attitude towards. 
 
 456 
 influence of, 66-68 
 literary works of, 4-5. iH-io, 2<*, 
 
 31-33- 35. 41. 43 45. 52 n^l^' '< 
 
 (juotud, 21 note, 25 note, 41, 
 
 50 note, 55 
 Lowe and. 34, 302 
 Northcote appiee';;:ed bv, 21, 
 
 218 
 jjolitical \iews of, 6-8 ; foreign 
 
 policy ( f (jt,- iilso (./iTV. I'lastern 
 
 ])olicy I, 1 5, 56, 59, 67 
 .St.uilev and, .? i 
 suffrage' e.\ti-n,-,inn, pelicy e;, 301;- 
 
 306, 309-10, .}42 
 
 otiierwise liuiitioned, 107, 171, 
 220 
 Hentinek, I .erd (ie.irgr, v 
 HiMion^ - 
 
 ch.iiige in !\;)e of, 1 r;6-wS 
 
 Hi/use of l.oid , picsen^e :n, 
 I I 2 
 
 indii try < <i. t^icj 
 
 inline!;,' . , ,|, iiju- Id, i 03 
 Hwina'e',,, I'rinie, z. ^ 
 r.lack. 1. .'-'utLeil.uid, 31 1 note 
 lk)\\"n, I'.dw.u .' !': iie^t - 
 
 1 ):(><;:, I p!r>- (1. 3 ;3 Uiile 
 
 e.ee-r nl, 3 15-1" 
 
 i'':,ir;;et.-r:-l;e, m1, ;e,) (>2 
 
 de.il'i (if, 55:; 
 
 e-.Lriu-., ,itl:lude t w:n.b, 3;i-:;2 
 
 inllU'-uee I 'I. 350 ; \ iev, s rei;,u-d- 
 m:.:. 3-3 ;.( 
 
 niil;t.i:\ i,:.l wv. f i::di:.'-s fur, ;;-
 
 482 Biographical Studies 
 
 Bowen, Edward Ernest 
 political interests of, 355-57 
 school songs of, 343 note, 359- 
 
 360 
 teaching methods of, 346-47, 349- 
 
 350. 354-55 
 training of teachers, views on, 
 
 348' 
 travel, fondness for, 358 
 walking tours of, 355 
 Bowen, Lord, 345, 359 
 Bright, John, 30, 98, 304, 428-29, 
 
 443. 455 note 
 Bradlaugh, Mr., 437 
 Brooke, Rev. Stopford, quoted, 135- 
 
 137 
 Brooks, Dr. Phillips, 209, 381 
 Brougham, Lord, 64, 428 
 Browning, Robert, 39, 126 
 Burke, Edmund, 411, 428, 440 
 Burney, Miss, 127 
 
 Cairns, Hugh M'Calmont, Earl 
 American Civil War, attitude 
 
 towards, 57 
 career of, 184-86 
 characteristics of, 184, 188-91 
 Disraeli compared with, 47 
 Gladstone compared with, 429 
 Jessel compared with, 180, 193 
 judicial gifts of, 192-93 , 
 legal manner of, 191-92 
 Mellish and, 176-78 
 parliamentary reform opposed by, 
 
 307 
 political partisanship of, 187, 194- 
 
 19s 
 religious views and interests of, 
 185-86, 193-94 
 Cambridge^ 
 
 Jewish scholar at, 319 note 
 Sidgwick at, 327 seq. 
 Smith, W. R., at, 319 
 Canterbury, importance of See of, 
 101-105 ; qualifications of arch- 
 bishops of, 105-107 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 40, 87, 92, 126, 
 
 277, 461 
 Celtic temperament, 403, 405 
 Chancery Bar, 170 ; famous trio at, 
 
 191 
 Chaticery Courts, 181-82 
 Charity Organisation Society, 133 
 Church, Dean, 251-52 
 Church- 
 Anglican 
 
 disestablishment of, 114 -15, 
 141 
 
 Church- 
 Anglican 
 
 possibilities before, 209-10 
 Stanley's view of, 78-79 
 Tractarian movement in, 252, 
 264 note, 406 
 Roman Catholic 
 adaptability of, 259 
 Infallibilist claims of, 256, 385 
 modern research, attitude to- 
 wards, 317 
 Clark, George T., quoted, 266-67 
 Clougli, Miss A. J., 329 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 338 
 Cobden, Mr., quoted, 430 
 Collins, Wilkie, 116 
 Copleston, Dr. (Bishop of Llandaff), 
 
 197 
 Creighton, Bishop, 289, 387 
 
 Dalgairns, 251 
 
 Dante, 469, 472 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 457, 471-72 
 
 De la Ditnocratie, Sch^rer's, cited, 
 
 309 note 
 Delane, Mr. , ji,2-z-'2.2, 
 De?nocracy and the Organisatioti of 
 
 Political Parties, Ostrogorski's, 
 
 cited, 309 note 
 Denison, Archdeacon, 133, 271 note 
 Derby, Lord, 10, 12, 28, 47, 57, 
 
 198, 429, 471 
 Dickens, Charles, 123, 127 
 Disraeli. See Beaconsfield 
 Dissenters. See Nonconformists 
 Dollinger, Dr. von, 383, 385, 392 
 Dupanloup, Bishop, 209, 385 
 
 Eastern Question (1876), 140, 275- 
 
 276, 300, 356, 419 
 Editors, types of, 363-64 ; tempta- 
 tions of, 370, 380-81 
 Eliot, George, 124, 328 
 Equity Courts, 170, 173 
 Essays and Reviews, 113, 317 
 Essays oti Refer 7n, cited, 307 and note 
 Evening Post, The, 365, 374-76 
 
 Forster, W. E. , 234, 239 and note 
 Fox, Charles James, 428-29, 436 
 France, novelists of, 129 
 Franchise extension. See Suffrage 
 l^-aser, James, Bishop of Man- 
 chester 
 
 biographies of, 196 note 
 
 career of, 196, 200-201 
 
 characteristics of, 204-205 
 
 energy of, 202
 
 Index 
 
 + H 
 
 Fraser, Jaiiifs, Hisliop of M.iii- 
 chester 
 
 influence of, 206 
 
 new Episcopal type created ],y, 
 196, 210 
 
 personality of, 203-204 
 
 popularity of, 202, 206 
 
 ritualist illegalities, attitude to- 
 wards, 208 
 
 science, attitude towards, 207 
 
 views of, 206-207 
 Freeman. Edward Augustus 
 
 biography of. 262 note 
 
 career of, 262-63 
 
 friendships of, 290 
 
 Green influenced hv, 137 
 
 historical work, merits of, 276-84 ; 
 style of, 286-87 
 
 humour of. 287 
 
 interests of. 264-67, 271-72 
 
 kindliness of, 278, 291 
 
 literary preferences of, 269-70 
 
 methodical ways of, 285 
 
 military liistor\-, fondness for, 357 
 
 Oxford work of, 287-89 
 
 political views of, 272-75 
 
 simplicity and directness of, 270- 
 271. 27s 
 
 Tronop(' and, 120. 271 p.nd 
 note 
 
 works of. 267. 284-06, 291-92 
 Fror.de, J. A., 271 note 
 
 fiard'tiiT. .S. R., 357 : (juotefi, 
 274 
 
 (iil/iOll, 133, 169, 281, 284 
 
 Gl.adstone, William I'lwait 
 
 ActoTi, Lord, relatioii.s with, 383. 
 
 399 
 Alab(:!)ia cl.iims, a' tinn regarding. 
 
 444, 447, 149. 451 
 Anierica.'i (Jivi! War. .utitwde to- 
 
 uards, 57 
 cirei-r of, 4 12 
 chnr.uteiislics of - 
 
 lii'Mdth .md kfcniit'ss of JPi- 
 terr-ts. 400. .113, 45c) 
 
 caution. 4o<;, 414. (ig, 447, 
 
 4. VI 
 com;>:exity of nature, .)oo, 401^- 
 
 po, 412 
 con-''i \'.itisni, .;o 1 . .(3(> 
 constructiv.- [in\'.ir. 43^- ! 1 
 ronvi-rs.Uional powers, 4',j 
 <oiiia:;e, 4)7 .md noli-. 4:2 
 
 note 
 c.,\irtrsv. 423 and not'", j;:,- 
 
 4s(.,'462 
 
 iladstniic, William I-'.wart 
 char.ictc; i-,tics of- - 
 ilignilv, 4^0 
 (mi>t:un.il c.xcit djility, 405, 410- 
 
 4". 433-34 
 lumu.ur, 4')0 
 unpu!si\cnc'<s. .;oi. 40:;, 421, 
 
 447 
 
 indepciidi'iici'. 410-IQ. 4:0 
 ingenuity, 40: 417-18, 430-31, 
 
 466 
 i!is;L;!it into eh.u.n t<r. .\--.-i, 
 m;i,':i.;itv. 402. 405, 426, 43;. 
 
 430. 434. 460. 4'i2 
 
 lovalt)', 4;'j 
 magnaninii'.w 4;7, 47S 
 nieniory, 404, 423, 431, : frr 
 
 f.ices. 423 
 o!)e!i-mindedne><. 417. 432, 453 
 oratory. 411. j,ii>-y,. 463 
 o\ er - suijtiety, 407. 432. 448. 
 
 453 
 pati''.;:?m, 451-32 
 pride, 416, .(20. 423. 452, 455. 
 
 474. 477 
 religious dis[iosition, 473-7f' ; 
 
 views. 401 . 406-408 
 reserve: i:<)iitic:il, .}oi), 4i.t-i;. 
 410, 453 ; perM:ial. 42.;, ;;;- 
 476 
 Scr)lti--h teiaprranient. 403-.;o; 
 >elf-conlideIiCe. 224 
 simplaity. .133. 4~w, 462. 475 
 sinceril\'. 401 
 tenipei , 455-^7 
 traii'ia !l:t\', 4' '2 
 V-rre. 43.,. 43"- ^8 
 I );sraeli .md. 1 i . 33. 3; 
 estiniiite- y'., .; M , 417, .;4S ; con- 
 tinent.!:. 4 \.\ 
 f.'.milv ot. 40 '. 
 foreieM -ff.ia-. itlif.ule to\',,iriK, 
 
 443 -i7. \--' 
 ! ifeiiKin's .ip; ;!;;rii'-:'.t ! 'W 2>^ \ 
 I i;;;', K \\\\\\ \\ .'y." : .\\\\<-.\\-^ ol. u,8 
 honV- !;te ,,1, ;"2. .) 7 ;, ;-: 
 I! ,m-- \<v:..- M '1 . ' , i>r'> , .--z 
 Homeric sti,,'. , , ' ,, - .ii, .(Ol . 
 
 4"? ' 
 
 llo-tllilV t", 3(14 
 
 la.-r.uv .\^V.\:\\'- ; I , I'S. 
 
 .;' ;-Ci, 
 l.i.u,'- ,. inr.ir. .! . .-.io. 
 
 .l-:>,, !3^ ; 
 \". 2.,; ; I. 
 
 imst.lkrs (.f, ; ;:: 
 
 V.-r;!;: ..t" and, 212, . t '
 
 484 Biographical Studies 
 
 Gladstone, William Ewart 
 Oxford training of, 406-408 
 parliamentary abilities of, 421-22, 
 
 424-26 
 Parnell's resentment against, 239- 
 
 240, 247 
 Peel's influence 
 453 
 
 on, ID, 409, 
 
 poetr}', attitude towards, 472 
 
 quoted, 56 
 
 Reform Bill of, 13, 442 
 
 scholarship of, 469 
 
 science, attitude towards, 408, 470 
 
 suffrage qualifications, proposed re- 
 duction of, 308 note 
 
 theological views of, tinging poli- 
 tical, 474 
 
 otherwise mentioned, 67, 113, 179, 
 187, 221, 260 
 Godkin, Edwin Lawrence 
 
 career of, 365-66 
 
 courage of, 370-71 
 
 geniality of, 376 
 
 humour of, 368-73 
 
 independence of, 364, 369, 381 
 
 influence of, 378-80 
 
 sincerity of, 367, 373, 380 
 
 style of, 367-68, 373 
 
 Tammany, attitude towards, 374 
 and note 
 
 views of, 366-67, 370, 374-76 
 Green, John Richard 
 
 biography of, 131 note 
 
 career of, 131-34 
 
 conversation of, 165-66 
 
 eloquence of, 166 
 
 gifts and qualities of, 146, 151-52, 
 154, 160-62, 164-67 
 
 ill-health of, 138, 141-46 
 
 interests of, 151, 154-57 
 
 letters of, 131 note, 152-53 
 
 literary work of Saturday Review 
 articles, 133, 135-37, 153 ; his- 
 torical, 138-39, 142-45, 155, 
 158-60, 163-64 ; characteristics 
 of, 139-40, 150, 152-53, 157-65, 
 167-69 
 military history, fondness for, 
 
 357 
 political activity of, 140-41 
 views of, 134 
 Green, Prof. Thomas Hill 
 career of, 85 
 characteristics of, 86-91 
 civic activities of, 98 
 influence of, 95-97, 99 
 literary works of, 92-94, 98 
 political keenness of, 95, 97 
 
 Green, Prof. Thomas Hill 
 views of, 93, 97, 335 
 otherwise mentioned, 265, 268, 
 278 
 
 Hardy, Gathorne, 213 
 Hardy, Thomas, 116 
 Healy, T. M., 443 
 Henry VHI. , 271 note 
 Herodotus, 149-51 
 Historians 
 
 qualifications of, 146-48, 156, 277 
 
 tw^o classes of, 149 
 History, Freeman's view of, 268, 
 
 274 
 Hodgkin, Dr. Thomas, 357 
 Holker, Sir John, 454 note 
 House of Commons 
 
 character of, 48 
 
 erroneous sketches of, 121 
 
 lawyers in, 172 
 
 leadership of, 217, 424 
 
 occasional detachment of, from 
 popular sentiment, 51 
 
 power of, declining, 308-309 
 
 rhetoric unpopular with, 296 
 Huxley, 207 
 
 Iddesleigh. Sec Xorthcote 
 Ireland 
 
 Anglo-Irish Protestants, 229-30 
 Church disestablishment in, 113, 
 187, 273, 407, 419, 442, 449 
 and note 
 Disraeli's attitude towards, 56-^7, 
 
 Green, J. R. , views of, regarding, 
 
 141 
 Home Rule, views regarding, of 
 
 Acton, 384 ; Bowen, 356 ; 
 
 Bright, 455 note ; Freeman, 
 
 272 ; Gladstone, 272, 414, 
 
 447 ; Godkin, 375 
 Land ]3ill of 1881, 425, 443 
 
 James, Heni"y, 129 
 Jessel, Sir George 
 
 Cairns compared with, 180, 193 
 
 career of, 171 
 
 judicial methods of, 174-75, 179 
 181, 194 
 
 mental powers of, 173, 181-82 
 
 parliamentary manner of, 172 
 
 quickness of, 173, 176, 183, 193 
 Jews 
 
 bigotry towards, 183 
 
 Cambridge scholar, anecdote of, 
 319 note
 
 Index 485 
 
 Jew:. NapoKvin, Louis. 5;, r-.j. 1,8 
 
 concentration, power of, iws.scsmxI .Wition. J'ht\ 305, 3')8, s7'-7v \~a 
 
 by, 23 and note j NVwiu.ui, Cardinal, -5 1 - Vj, ' 42 . 
 
 constTvatisni of, 25 note ' nof, 467 
 
 detaclniient (.f, 19-20 Xewnh.uii Colleu.', (;:un!-ridi,'e. 329- 
 
 distinctions i;ained ti\-, 171 330 
 
 practicality of, 182 Xoncun'.'onni.ts 
 
 satirical powers of, 45 I Jisraeli's di--!ik'- of, h, t,-2 
 
 Jowett, 113, 150 |-:<luc.ltiMn Art !l8-0) lesei.ted 
 
 l.v, 13 
 Kelvin, Lord, 184 1-ra.ser s .ittitud.- ti A.irds, 20:;, 
 
 Kiplini;, Kudyard, 129 206-208 note 
 
 (iladstone truste<l by. 401 
 Lawrence, Lord, 184 (ireen's dislike of, \ ^Ji 
 
 Lightfoot, Bishop, 199-200,200, 290 , N'orthcote, Sir ."Stafford 1 L'.rd I..':.> 
 
 Louis -Vapoleon, 55, 64, 98 | li-i!;hi 
 
 Lowe, Robert j biot;r:!phy of, 211 i:>t-- 
 biography of, 293 note career 1 if, 21 2-1 ; 
 
 Cairns compared with, 188 I cliai actm-tic-, of, 21 \. 222-25. 
 
 career of, 293-95, 299-300 \ 22;-j') 
 
 characteristics of, 301-304 ! (;ia<lst<j;u- loinpared \\ -tii, .(3; 
 
 Disraeli and, 34, 302 I p.uiiameiit.'.ry abilities ot, ji.;-i' 
 
 eclipse of fame of, 293, 300 218 
 
 educational work of, 294-95, 30-J' : -Novels, t\pcs of, 122 
 
 305 
 (Gladstone compared with, 293, C)'Ci)nnel!, I),.niel, 6, 8. j;S 
 
 299, 429, 435 ; antagonism to 1 (jliphant, Mrs., 110 
 
 (iladstone, 295; in (il.idstone's i Oratory-- 
 
 Cabinet. 299 ele\-at!Oii ;n 433 
 Oxford, at, 301 note- n'MUatioii fir, ii.it'ii'- -7 
 
 rhetorical power of, 2o6-(,7 ' Oxf nU- 
 
 shortsightedness of, 300-301 ; (.;r, n.T. [ 1. , i m nr.ain iii.i'. < .11 
 
 Utilitarianism of, 304 ! of. (,^-oo 
 
 Lyndhur.--l, i.i-rd, 2^/ Thai-kcrav's . .indidatiin- i(.r, 12:1 
 
 ' Oxford l'niv.-i-a\ 
 Macaulay, 139, 169, 270, 274. 281, Tr.ut.in.in nioV' p.^t-nt i'l, . - 
 
 428, 42.-, nr,U- I J-.; not.-. .(-.M 
 
 Macd(jna!d. Sir John. \., 422 j trainiiu; it. thai, uteri : 
 
 Macleiinan, John 1'., 320 40S, 4'>7 
 
 Magt;e, Archbishop, 112, 199, 42', 
 
 Manning, ('.inlinal If<-ii'-y i".d\Min': ; I'alnvi, Roiaidr':! Lnrd >';in:iir , 
 
 biogr.Lpiiv of, 2bo-fJi i;-''. ii;i-o2. .a,.; 
 
 career of. 250-51 i'almerstnii, Lord, 13. 28. 40. 57 
 
 characteristics of, 2^1-54, 261 98, 2<,.t 
 
 convrrsioiis eftrcted \)\ . 2^^ I'.ii liatnrni. .V.,' I I, .ii>.r / >! t ..iimi- ''. 
 
 Iidallibilist cause, work for, 2^:6 ; I'.inu-H, 1 h.i il^--, .'-t'".'. ;a t 
 
 inten-sts and ^vmixatiiies ot, j;7- ; luci;! .ipiiv . .!, 2.-j i-':' 
 
 2',i ' \ caM-r: ,,f. 22 2 . 
 
 speeches (.'f. 2^5 ' fim:'\>)t. J.'7 
 .Maurice, i-". 1). , 134, .jo8 liMd''r>hip. iipti'"--. i- , . ; 
 
 Melli.ih. Lord justice, I7''>7, ni. -ral c oUM:;e ' ! , 2 ;) 
 
 Men-dith, (ieorge, iiO, 122 p.i: li.itnc-nlai \ ta. t:. s ,:, j i ;-' 1,, 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 'u, 78 note, i,.~- ' 244 ; ku' 'wlr'dr.e I'l pi i" .;:!, 
 
 304 -^}2 .) ; 
 
 .Monk, Mi.diop, I. ,7 ; pa.-iMii ,':id M-'l . Miitr..! (.;, 40 
 
 Muguuaips, 375 ,ind note 1 l'i:i: ir.x \'.\\V inu:i!'-r-, di-m.-.u;. >':; 
 
 ' all'-. . . ^'.. 2 ;8 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte, 238 , ' ',i;..;t ,.,!i.,a-, ,!ll.tu.!- '.,s ;
 
 486 Biographical Studies 
 
 Parnell, Charles Stewart 
 
 practicality of, 230-33 
 
 pride of, 233, 235-38 
 
 self-confidence of, 224, 236, 238 
 
 speeches of, 241-42 
 
 unscrupulousness of, 237-38 
 
 unsympathetic manner of, 190 
 
 views of, 245-46 
 Peel, Sir Robert 
 
 caution of, 409, 453 
 
 death of, 10 
 
 Disraeli's conduct towards, 28 and 
 note ; his view of, 55 
 
 financial policy of, 441-42 
 
 Gladstone compared with, 411, 
 440, 456, 476 
 
 separation of, from Conservatives, 
 9, 61 
 
 speeches of, 428 
 Pitt, William, 428, 436, 440, 442, 
 
 477 ^ 
 Popular Government, Sir H. Maine's, 
 
 cited, 309 note 
 Psychical Research Society, 331-32 
 Pusey, Dr., cited, 80 
 
 Rhodes, Cecil, 246 
 
 Roll, Lord Justice, igi-92 
 
 Roman Catholic (Church. See under 
 
 Church 
 Russell, Lord, 13, 28, 57, 295 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 186, 247, 295, 456 
 
 Satu7-day Review 
 
 Bowen's contributions to, 360 
 Freeman's contributions to, 285 ; 
 
 dissociation from, 275 
 Green's contributions to, 133, 135- 
 
 137. 153 
 Schoolmasters, types of, 343, 346 
 Schools Inquiry Commission, 200-201 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 123, 125 
 Scottish temperament and character- 
 istics, 315, 403-405 
 Selborne, Lord. See Palmer, Roundell 
 Sherbrooke, Viscount. See Lowe, 
 
 Robert 
 Sidgwick, Henry 
 career of, 327-29 
 characteristics of, 338-42 
 impartiality of, 334 
 literary preferences of, 338 
 psychical research, interest in, 331- 
 
 332 
 views of, philosophical and political, 
 
 335-37 
 women's education promoted by, 
 
 329 
 
 Sidgwick, Henry 
 
 works of, 332-34, 338 
 Skene, Mr., cited, 158 
 Smith, Professor Goldwin, 76, 281 
 Smith, R. Bosworth, quoted, 349-50 
 Smith, Prof. Robertson 
 Acton, Lord, and, 387 
 career of, 311 -12, 315, 318- 
 
 320 
 characteristics of, 323-25 
 ecclesiastical trial of, 313-16 
 Encyclopedia Briiannica, work on, 
 
 312-14 
 versatility of, 322 
 
 works of, 320-21 : characteristics 
 of, 321 
 Stanley, Very Rev. Arthur Penrhyn - 
 career of, 70 
 characteristics of, 71, 73, ']], 82- 
 
 84 
 debating power of, 77 
 Disraeli and, 81 
 family of, 69-70 
 Green influenced b}-, 132, 137 
 literary work of, 71-74 
 politics of, 78 
 sermons of, 76-77 
 theological position of, 80-81 
 Tait, attitude towards, 113 
 otherwise mentioned, 164-65, 205- 
 206 
 Statesmanship, necessary qualifica- 
 tions for, 46 
 Stevenson, R. L. , 129 
 Stubbs, Bishop, 138, 160, 289-90, 
 
 454 "ote 
 Suffrage extension 
 
 Disraeli's view of, 52, 57-58, 67- 
 
 68, 310 
 Lowe's opposition to, 295-98, 305- 
 
 306 
 results of, 306-309 
 
 Tait, Archibald Campbell, Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury 
 biography of, cited, 100 note 
 career of, 107 
 
 characteristics of, 108-12, 209 
 Green appointed librarian by, 133- 
 
 T34 
 influence of, 110-12 
 Irish Church Disestablishment Bill, 
 
 attitude towards, 187 
 policy of, 112, 114 
 views of, 1 10 
 Temple, Archbishop, ii3andnote, 199 
 Tennyson, 39, 459 
 Thackeray, W. M., 35, 120, 123-25
 
 Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 487 
 
 Thirlw.ill, Hishop, 1 1 j 
 
 I'hucydidi's, 144-50 
 
 'I'one, Wolfi-. 22iy. J43 
 
 Tory party - 
 
 nature of. 218 ; (i84rf-iS'ni, i-u-,j 
 suffrage extension protitahlt- 'o, ^j. 
 57-5^. 67, 310 
 
 'I'raetarian inovenient, 252. 2"; note 
 406 
 
 Trollope, Anthony 
 biographies of, cited, 110 note 
 I-'reeman and, 120, 271 ,ind note 
 Hterary position ol, 116-10 
 personahty of, 118, 126 
 pohtical activity of. i2(^ 
 travels of, 121-22 
 works of, 117-20, 128; character- 
 istics of, 122-30 
 
 .\rUm'> kn"u!rdi,'e ,jf !i;-,tor_\- >il. 
 J"7 
 
 l'Vi-eni,in'> \is;t to, 2').^/ 
 
 joinn.di^ni in, 379 
 
 I'reslivli-rianiMn in, 317 
 
 religion and p'j'.itie^ divM)i. uited :n, 
 
 100 
 Trollope's .ICC' Hint of. 122 
 ruiver>ity inlhience in. 378 
 
 \\C-ti)Ur>. l.oid 303 
 Whiggisin, (), 8. hj,. 2-,i-\ .\' ^, 
 W'dlierforce, ii^hup S.unu'-l , i i i i 2, 
 
 loS. 2;4. 421) 
 Woni'-M. ediK-ition o'. 32^-3 1 
 \\'ords\\ortn, 301 
 Wright, Willi. nil. ^19 .ir.d iinte', 320 
 
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