MR. GLADSTONE'S VISIT TO MEL.
GLADSTONIAN contemporary seems to be sur- prised that, since Mr. Gladstone's resignation, the Opposition Press have treated his public appearances with so much geniality and so very little trace of political resentment. We cannot share the surprise. In the first place, Mr. Gladstone himself appears to have cast his former official role completely behind him. He has not, of course, forgotten what he aimed at, nor the eagerness with which he threw himself into the fray. But in putting off his armour, he has put off all the combative- ness of the great partisan. He clearly enjoys, instead of lamenting, the new freedom of his position. It is a refreshment, rather than a gloomy regret, to him to find himself at liberty to be really a looker-on. He occupies himself once more with his own eager interest in the drama of history, exactly as if the world had not looked upon every one of his utterances with either a fierce sympathy or a still fiercer desire to make political capital out of it for an attack. There is nothing in him of the Achilles on the watch for an opportunity of making his former friends feel the difference now that he is gone, and enjoying the growing audacity of his former foes. On the contrary, he accepts his new irresponsibility with a zest at least as great as that with which he formerly endeavoured to make his weight felt as the protagonist of a great cause. And it is natural enough that the genuine alacrity with which he welcomes his freedom, should appease his former adver- saries and make them look upon him rather as a great neutral than as the greater soldier from whom they had received so many mighty buffets. If Lord Salisbury had gone out of the fray, there are plenty of indications that the Gladstonians would treat him with the same courtesy. When he took the Chair at the British Association, and was for the moment a politician no longer, did they not exult in the distinction which his literary skill lent to an address which, when a great expert has delivered it, has not unfrequently been a cause of perplexity and lamenta- tion to the general public ? There is very little rancour in English politicians. We are not even quite sure that Mr. Chamberlain himself would not be received with generous congratulations by the Gladstonians who now attack him so fiercely, if he ever took up a genuinely neutral position, though, no doubt, it is easier to pardon the blows of the commander-in-chief when he ceases to be com- mander-in-chief, than the blows of a second in command, whose superabundant energy is hardly regarded as equally obligatory upon him. Mr. Gladstone, however, in spite of his great achievements as a party leader, is, no doubt, exceptionally easy to forgive. For no commander-in-chief has ever shown so frankly and almost gleefully, the satisfaction he has felt in putting behind him all the responsibilities of his former position.
Still, the eager interest with which Mr. Gladstone's visit to Kiel to watch the evolutions of the great European Fleet is regarded by former friend and former foe alike, is not due simply to the success with which he has managed to ignore his official life as a party leader. To see a man of eighty-five showing all this boyish curiosity in the great events passing around him, is, in itself, a very attractive and refreshing sight. As a rule, age and the long fatigue of combat, extinguish the appetite for new experience. There is no more certain mark of the weight of years than the excuses which old men find for not plunging into a new task. The old are fertile in ostensibly good reasons for not undertaking a new task, for not reading a new book, for not embarking on a new journey. It is not so with Mr. Gladstone. He devours new books exactly as he did in his youth. His spirit rises to new adventures with all the vivacity of a mind that has its career still before it. He seems to say with Ulysses,—though
" We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Nowhere do we find so much as in Mr. Gladstone of the spirit which Tennyson breathed into his insatiable Greek :- " How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use !
As though to breathe were life ! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains."
But all the same, that little which remains is not to be spent in brooding over the past, but in exploring the unexplored. The old warrior cares nothing for fighting his old battles over again, but " this grey spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge, like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought," is as eager as ever for new experience. Amongst us, and especially amongst us as we are at the present day, that is a very rare phenomenon. We see even the young asking drearily what it all matters, why we should trouble to see more of what has tired us so much already. Mr. Gladstone knows nothing of this easily satiated curiosity. Everything is interesting to him, everything is fresh. When he was young he was so interested in the world's past that he was eager to hold fast by it, and was an enthusiastic Con- servative. Now that he is old he is so interested in the world's changes, so delighted with the wonderful kaleido- scopic effects which the whirligig of time brings about, that he is an enthusiastic Liberal, and always eager to turn the kaleidoscope again. No one can resist the fasci- nation of so ardent a spirit. No wonder that we all follow in imagination his voyage to Kiel, with the conviction that nothing he finds there, magnificent in its stored-up force though it will be, is likely to be half as impressive as that inexhaustible energy of curiosity and faith which the statesman who was born before Wellington took up his position on the heights of Torres Vedras, carries with him. None of our monster ships can rival the mystery of the unwearied mind which, having achieved so much and attempted so much more, is still far more eager to prove the significance of what in strange to him, than to dwell on the details of a contest on which he has turned his back.
The charm of this inexhaustible confidence of Mr. Glad- stone's, that to whatever aspect of the world we turn, whether the spiritual or the natural, the political or the social, the scientific or the literary, the antique or the mediaeval, or the newest of all modern devices, there will always be something in it to fill the mind with wonder and delight, is partly no doubt that such confidence is justified, if you choose the right things to contemplate, and partly that it is so extremely foreign to the tone of this fin-de-siecle temper of ours which has lost its appetite for greatness so completely that it dwarfs everything to its own pettiness. Because its own interests are dried up it regards the universe as used up. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, has never ceased to find the world fresh and full of wonder. Theology is as much to him as politics, and literature as inexhaustible as science. He is as eager to hear the newest comment on Homer or Dante, as he is to hear the newest developments from China and Japan. Such freshness of feeling is not unusual in men of seventy, not unheard-of in men of eighty-five ; but in a man of eighty-five who has been expending a superfluity of energy during a long public life of sixty years, and of sixty years of constant battle, it is almost as great a marvel as the appearance of a new Homer or a new Dante or a new Shakespeare in an age which has run to seed so effectually as ours.
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