BOOKS OF THE DAY

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Mr. Gladstone (E. L. Woodward; . .

• •

918 The Battle of the Books (E. E. Kellett) . .

919 War and Democracy (Frank Pakenham)

919 The Necessity of Freedom (H. W. J. Edwards) ..

920 Wallenstein : Soldier under Saturn (David Ogg)

922 Without Knowing Mr. Walkley (Lord David Cecil)

922

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Roumanian Journey (Evelyn Waugh)

924

Eighteenth-Century Caricature (L. G. WiCkham Legg). .

924

The Nonesuch Whitman (Sean O'Faolain) . .

926

A Century of City Government (R. F. Scott)

926

Fiction (Kate O'Brien)

928

Current Literature ..

930 MR. GLADSTONE

By E. L. WOODWARD As the years recede, the position of Mr. Gladstone in English history becomes most clear ; there is more general agreement about the nature of his genius, and discriminating respect for the range and immensity of his work. In England at least the time is gone by when the young men thought it clever to laugh

at political liberalism. The smart and slick studies of Victorian figures written fifteen or twenty years ago are now oddly out of fashion, and it needs an effort of memory, on re-reading them, to remember why they could ever have had even a temporary success. It should have been obvious at the time that the writers who had their clever fun with the Victorians were really living in a world of books, and that they were amusing themselves not with the politicians, or soldiers or men of affairs, but with their biographers. The biographers were for the most part fair game ; probably no age has suffered more than the age of Peel and Gladstone from the tediousness and long-winded banality of three-volume Lives. The history of the men who ruled and fought in British India is a good example of this deadening process of hagiography. Here is subject-matter as interesting and exciting and often more varied, than the history of the English seamen of the sixteenth century, but the interest lies buried under these ponderous literary tombstones.

In this respect Mr. Gladstone has been more fortunate than most of his great contemporaries. Morley's Life of Gladstone is a panegyric, but a panegyric written by an author not given to emotional outbursts, a cool and ironic observer, and for all his affection, more ready to admire qualities of intellect than of heart. Even after these years it is difficult for a biographer of Mr. Gladstone to compete with John Morley. The measure of Dr. Eyck's success may be judged by the difference between the reproduction of Millais' portrait of Mr. Gladstone at the beginning of his book and the sharper and more sensitive re- production of the same picture in the frontispiece to the second volume of Morley's Life. Dr. Eyck has written a quiet and sober book, and, in spite of a good many minor slips, a careful book ; but there is not much distinction about it. The transla- tion is excellent; the text, except for an odd mistake in the title of Chapter V, reads as though it had been written in English ; yet a translator cannot make a good book out of an " uninspired " narrative. On the other hand, it would be unfair not to call attention to the advantages of Dr. Eyck's method. He does not strain after cheap effects, or try to defend paradoxical or doctrinaire views. He is more fair to Disraeli than to Palmerston, and less than fair to Queen Victoria, but in general his judgement is solid and well-founded. Indeed Dr. Eyck is mainly content to check and reaffirm the views of his prede- cessors ; the trouble is that the ground has already been well- trodden and that many writers have given us this same narrative. The story of Gordon ; the story of Parnell ; the last years ; the tragic moment of Mr. Gladstone's resignation ; the funeral in Westminster Abbey, with two future kings as pall-bearers ; or, many years earlier, the visit to Naples; the speeches about the Bulgarian atrocities.

There is room for a new survey of Mr. Gladstone's political career, if the material is taken from sources other than printed biographies and memoirs or looked at from a new angle of view. The history of the Liberal Party—the working of the party machine, the direct and indirect effects upon English social development of Mr. Gladstone's concentration on Ireland have not yet been examined in detail. The Irish Gladstone. By Erich Eyck. Translated from the German by Bernard Miall. (Allen and Unwin. iss.) -

question itself has not found a great historian, and this historian. if and when he appears, will not content hiniself with the dramatic side of events or with the record of the Irish Party in the House of Commons. It is also possible to write the life of Mr. Gladstone in terms of the political and social movements which he did not understand as well as in terms of the par- liamentary conflict of which he was a master. One might explain why men like William Morris, not far removed in age from Mr. Gladstone's own generation, should have given up the Liberal Party in despair after the Liberal success at the polls in 1880. Some men gave up Liberalism because they had read Marx, or because they had read other men who had read Marx. William Morris could never read Marx, and did not make the attempt to understand him even at second-hand. Yet he ruled out of account the political views which Liberals like Mr. Gladstone or Lord Acton came near to identifying with religion, and in the dream-world of News from Nowhere the Houses of Parliament (not merely because Morris disliked the perpendicular revival in architecture) were used as a muni- cipal garden store. - There are other questions which a biographer of Mr. Gladstone might raise, even in a one-volunke book. A decade or two ago it was often said that political oratory was dead. Political oratory is dangerously alive, though its successes are greatest in the countries which have given up free institutions, and the chosen instrument of democratic government has now been turned against democracy. An Englishman, listening recently to the broadcast of one of Herr Hitler's speeches, could not avoid contrasting the German orator's clumsy narration of statistics for hours on end with Mr. Gladstone's handling of similar matters in his budget speeches. What,is the difference between the oratory of dictators and the speeches of statesmen in free countries ? What was the effect of Mr. Gladstone's immense power 'over words upon his audience ? Dr. Eyck tells us again and again that competent judges were amazed at Mr. Gladstone's virtuosity ; but one would like to know, in more detail, what were the results of these speeches in forming or changing opinion at long range ; above all, one wants to enquire what was the effect of Mr. Gladstone's oratory upon the speaker himself.

It is important to remember that Mr. Gladstone was not merely the son of a successful business man, free to give his attention to politics because his father provided him with a comfortable fortune. There was a time when he risked the greater part of this fortune and spent month after month of hard work in saving from bankruptcy a large industrial concern belonging to his wife's family. The history of this incursion into practical affairs of profit and loss might well be told at length, since Mr. Gladstone's fame is likely to rest as much upon his financial and administrative genius as upon his insight into the Irish question. Mr. Gladstone's budget speeches and his attacks upon the leger-de-main of Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer repay close study. The style of these speeches does not encourage short quotations. Mr. Gladstone could make epigrams, though few of them are remembered except the judgement upon the rule of the Neapolitan Bourbons as " the negation of God erected into a system of government " or the wish (already expressed in the same terms by Stratford Can- ning) to turn the Turks " bag and baggage " out of Europe ; but the long speeches on tea, paper, and the income tax show a sustained power and mastery which can find an explanation only in the phrase quia nominor leo.