BOOKS.

MR. MORLEY'S LIFE OF GLADSTONE.* [FIRST NOTICE.]

THE great subject of this great memoir, fortunate as he was in so many of the circumstances and occasions of his long life, was not, to use the famous phrase, " fortunate in the occasion of his death," either in the political or the natural sense. Incomparably its greatest figure, he vanished from the House of Commons unnoticed and almost by stealth, and his last speech there was not the note upon which either his best friends or himself would deliberately have chosen that that wonderful fugue, his Parliamentary oratory, should end. When he died the world was surprised, not that he was so much, but that he was so little, missed. It seemed as though his reputation and his hold upon his countrymen had died before him. For the winding up of his literary labours, for the perfecting of his own character, for the "making of his soul," the last four years of retirement, and the final months of suffering nobly borne, were of precious value; but humanly speaking there were many earlier moments when, for fame and effect at any rate, his death would have seemed not only more dramatic but more happy.

But to-day his fortune has returned. He is certainly happy

• The Life of William Birart Gladstone. By John Morley. 3 roll. London; Macmillan and Co. [A2 2e. net.]

in the moment of the appearance of his biography. For the present hour, agitated by two great questions—the fiscal con- troversy, and that immemorial and tragic riddle of the Sphinx, the relations of Turk and Christian in Eastern Europe—and convulsed by the cleavage in what was the great party of his opponents, is the first moment since his disappearance when not only are his own side fuller than ever of revived hope, but when friend and foe alike will turn with renewed interest to read again the record of the momentous and historic handling of these problems by the master who, whether for good or ill, treated them with such comprehensive interest and such commanding force.

" Oh for an hour of Mr. Gladstone !" said the Bishop of Worcester the other night at a public meeting on the Eastern question. All will not echo the cry. Some will hold that the very difficulties in which that question is still involved were due to the too impetuous chivalry of the transcendent paladin, the Roland, whose "wild horn" had such magic potence. But all will feel that the cry has more reality than it would have bad at any juncture since his removal from this scene, and will ask what the cry for Mr. Gladstone actually means, and wherefore it goes up, and how and why he held this place in the hearts of so many both of his own countrymen and of citizens of other nationality.

And certainly he is fortunate in his biographer. During his long life it must often have occurred to many to consider how and by whom could the tremendous task of recording it be attempted. A man so various, and also so vast, that he seemed to be, not so much "all mankind's epitome," as all mankind writ large in one typical man of more than human measure, a giant, a Colossus, could any one writer attempt to portray him completely, a business which even mechanically and in its volume seemed to require a committee or a syndicate of authors ? But when it was announced that Mr. John Morley had decided to enterprise the task, more and more it came to be seen that no one could be better. An Oxford scholar ; a practised publicist ; a Cabinet Minister, and in Mr. Glad- stone's own Cabinets ; an ardent Liberal, and of the older type; a Home-ruler, peculiarly well acquainted with the Irish problem,—he had all, or almost all, the personal qualifications required. But what is more, he had made, though not of set purpose, exactly the right preliminary studies. The biographer of Burke and Rousseau, of Walpole and Cobden, the author of the Studies in Literature and the treatise on Compromise, might seem peculiarly fitted to deal with many of the sides even of so many-sided and Protean a hero as Mr. Gladstone. One serious question remained. What of the religious side ? Even there Mr. Morley's friends felt little doubt that his sympathy, literary tact, and absolute honesty would be equal to the difficulty. If any others less well informed still had qualms, the appearance, shortly after it was known that he was to be the biographer of Mr. Gladstone, of his Life of Cromwell set them at rest. That admirable book, distinguished by many shining qualities, is distinguished by none more than the large-minded fairness of its historic judgment. It is what Cromwell himself desired,—Cromwell "with his warts," personal and spiritual, but Cromwell with his dignity and greatness. And it was exactly the last crowning study that was required to prepare the writer for the great work which he has now completed and given to the world.

Let us say at once that it is a great task greatly achieved, a grand portraiture of a grand subject on a great scale, and in a worthy style. This is what it should be. Long, of course, it is ; but long it has a right—nay, a necessity—to be. Mr. Gladstone's life was long, his career was even more remarkably so. Both his life and his career were extra- ordinarily — nay, incredibly — full of interest and event. " Between two and three thousand written papers of one sort or another," says his biographer, " must have passed under my view." And again, he tells us that in the " Octagon," a little " strong-room " built by Mr. Gladstone and called by him "a necessity of my profession and history," there were some sixty thousand selected, and several tens of thousands of unselected, letters. Such were some of Mr. Morley's materials, but beside these there were Mr. Gladstone's own letters and notes, and also a " very arid diary," as Gladstone himself was wont to call it, filling some forty little books in double columns. Furthermore, when he was in office there were his official letters to the Queen, in theniselves a history, and no brief one.

These materials alone, it will be seen, might justify the three bulky volumes, each of some six hundred' closely printed pages, within which Mr. Morley has managed'to com- prise and compress his theme. But beside these refeince has been made, as will be seen, to many other sources of information, to books, periodicals, journals of many kinds, to an extent, perhaps, more common in history than in biography. Yet this is only right in a biography which is, from the nature of the case, a " history of our own times," as well as a Life of their great protagonist. It, is excellently marshalled and arranged. The proportion of narrative and extract is just and skilful. The employment of appendices is useful, and does not, as so often happens, suggest that the malady now so fashionable attacks books as well as men. There is much art, the greater for not being too apparent, in the disposition of the chapters and topics, and it is needless to say that in detail and in the larger way it is generally well written and composed.

But there are qualities even more important than these, though without these they must miss their effect. When he submitted, writes Mr. Morley in his preface, an application to be allowed to use certain documents for the use of which the permission of the Sovereign is required, Queen Victoria, " in readily promising her favourable consideration, added a message strongly impressing that the work I was about to undertake should not be handled in the narrow way of party. This injunction represents my own clear view of the spirit in which the history of a career so memorable as Mr. Gladstone's should be composed." That the injunction has been observed, the acceptance fulfilled, every chapter, if not every page, will show.. Not that, of course, Mr. Morley suppresses or dissembles his own leanings. To do so would be, as he himself says, only to spoil the book. " Indifferent neutrality in a work pro- duced, as this is, in the spirit of loyal and affectionate remem- brance would be distasteful, discordant, and impossible. I should be heartily sorry if there were no signs of partiality and no evidence of prepossession. On the other hand, there is, I trust, no importunate advocacy or tedious assentation- Mr. Gladstone was great man enough to stand in need of neither." This is finely said, and is most true. The first requisite in a biographer, especially of such a man as Mr. Gladstone, is that be should love his hero. Even the reviewer of a Life of Mr. Gladstone must feel somewhat of this claim in dealing with a character so great and so generous, both in its virtues and its foibles, as was his ; and not least the reviewer in these columns, which gave him for so many years such warm-hearted and such whole-hearted support. " Rely upon it," as we read in these pages that he wrote to Mr. R. H. Hutton, whom Mr. Morley rightly calls one of the choice spirits of our age, " I can never quarrel with you or with Bright."

While, then, as Mr. Morley would be the first to allow, our admiration may sometimes be more qualified than his own, and we may think that truth requires some criticism of his presentment of certain aspects, we can praise without qualifica- tion the pervading spirit and honesty of his great work. Foremost in its merits are its seriousness and loftiness of tone. Mr. Morley in the striking introductory pages which he has prefixed to the first volume—Tacitean in their terse dis- crimination of character and situation—calls attention with much candour to a possible deficiency to which allusion has already been made. " The detailed history of Mr. Gladstone as theologian and churchman will not be found," he says, " in these pages, and nobody is more sensible than their writer of the gap." In his modesty he has perhaps overstated the defect. In a sense, no doubt, it is true that a writer more fully possessed of the same religious and ecclesiastical faith and fervour as Mr. Gladstone himself would have written with a certain understanding, unction, and warmth which are not to be found in this volume ; but it cannot be said that large justice is not done to this all-important side of Mr. Gladstone's life and character, even if it be from a somewhat external point of view. And if the definite spirit of any special Communion be wanting, there is not wanting an abundant measure of the elevation and moral earnestness which, as Mr. Gladstone learned, and not least from Mr. Morley himself, may be found within many religious pales, perhaps occasionally without them all. It is indeed this tone which gives its character to the book, a 'character peculiarly appropriate. The reader should be warned, indeed, that these volumes tare not easy or light reading. Of political gossip, even of the more innocent kind, he will find very little; of scandal, political or otherwise, none. What he will find if he has the patience to follow Mr. Morley—and patience and diligence are required—is a faithful, skilful, and admirably developed account of the evolution of Mr. Gladstone's character and career.

Mr. Gladstone's Life has, of course, been written before ; much of it has appeared in the Lives of his illustrious con- temporaries ; much, again, in the histories of different epochs of the long period during which he was connected with public affairs. The ingenious and sympathetic sketch of Mr. G. W. E. Russell; the judicious, and in its way complete, narrative of Mr. H. W. Paul; the happy sidelights thrown by Sir Edward Hamilton,—these and many other writings have rendered Mr. Morley's task in a sense more easy, but also more difficult, in so far as he has to compete with their accomplished, and in many ways easier, success. Mr. Morley, however, performs it with a completeness which has never been possible before. And what a marvellous story it is, as we once more read it in its ful- ness! It is difficult to-day, and for this generation, to realise that the Gladstone of the Home-rule battles, the Gladstone of the great reforms of 1868-74, the Gladstone of the last five-and-thirty years, had not only been in youth "the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories " (this Oilstone phrase, Mr. Morley has discovered, was a lucky afterthought of Lord Macaulay's), but had for nearly as long a time as he occupied on the Liberal benches sat with other parties. There are many paradoxes in Mr.

Gladstone's character and career ; nay, rather both are one perpetual paradox. The scholar who was a man of affairs, revelling alike in Homer and Dante and in the gross details of business and trade; the High Churchman who was the pioneer of Disestablishment, and the hero of the Noncon- formists, yet disappointing them only less seldom than his own friends,—these are a few of the contradictions he united in himself. But perhaps this revolution in his career is the most striking. Yet it is explained by the character of the man :—

" What interests the world," as Mr. Morley admirably puts it,

in Mr. Gladstone, is even more what he was than what he did ; his brilliancy, charm, and power ; the endless surprises ; his dualism or more than dualism ; his vicissitudes of opinion ; his subtleties of mental progress; his strong union of qualities never elsewhere found together; his striking unlikeness to other men in whom great and free nations have for long periods placed their trust."

This was indeed the case, and as we read the interminable story of his myriad activities it comes home to us more and more. He said himself, we are told, that the secret of his success was "concentration." Yet who ever spread, we had almost said " dissipated," his energies over a wider field ? He seemed at times as simple as a boy ; at others the oldest and most ruse of " Parliamentary hands." He was often compared to Achilles, and in his terrific onslaughts and restless fire, his imperious yet generous passion, he was eminently Achillean. But in truth he combined the characteristics of both the prime heroes of his favourite poet. He was Achilles and Ulysses, passion and policy, blended in one. Such a character, working its way through the infinite complexity of modern politics, surprises alike by its successes and failures, its startling forward rushes, its still more astonishing arresta-

tions. Its story forms a drama of unending interest; and it is this drama that with genuine artistic skill this book unrolls before us. The three volumes follow, on the whole, the natural main divisions of his life. These are in themselves theatrical.

The sixty-odd years of his political career fall into three divisions,—thirty of allegiance to something which was not definite Liberalism, thirty of allegiance to the Liberal, these consisting of two periods divided by his historic retirement in 1874. The natural landmark of the end of the first period is, indeed, the loss of his seat as Member for Oxford University, when he felt himself, as he said, "unmuzzled." And it might have been expected that Mr. Morley would have made this the close of his first volume.

But so to order matters would have been difficult. The arrange- ment, then, of the volumes would appear to be mainly mechanical. Ii any case, the story, though, as we have hinted, cleverly varied and broken up, is one and continuous. To follow it minutely in one or in any number of articles would be impossible. Indeed, to review such a book at all is like tendering the proverbial brick to show what the house is like, only that for the house we should have to substitute Windsor Castle or the Great Wall of China.

But in the course of further notices we hope to give some more detailed idea of the tenor and result of this great presentation, and of the general picture contained in what is at once one of the most fascinating and—alike in what may be thought 'by different schools the errors and the successes of its hero—the most instructive of biographies ever submitted for the perusal, first, of a great man's fellow-countrymen, and after them, of the general civilised world.