Mr. Gladstone: a new picture takes shape.

Vincent, John

Agatha Ramm, William Ewart Gladstone. (U Wales P, 1989), ix + 129 pp., 12.95 [pounds sterling].

H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809-1874. (Oxford UP, 1989), 12.95 [pounds sterling]. (First published 1986.)

H.G.C. Matthew, ed., The Gladstone Diaries With Cabinet Minutes and Prime-Ministerial Correspondence. Volume X. January 1881-June 1883. (Clarendon, 1990), cxcii + 479 pp., $125; Volume XI. July 1883-December 1886. (Clarendon, 1990), vi + 702 pp., $125.

Studies of Gladstone now divide into two groups: those written before the diaries appeared, and those written after. Among the former, E.J. Feuchtwanger's Gladstone (Macmillan, 1975; 2nd revised ed. 1989) has for fifteen years worthily held the field as the standard student text. John Morley's official life was too long; Hammond was too narrowly Irish in theme; Philip Magnus's Gladstone: A Biography (1954), for all its charm, was best on family background and personality. So Feuchtwanger it was, for a sound exposition of current research.

Yet Feuchtwanger (pp. xxii + 317) was essentially pre-diary. This separates him from those who follow: Richard Shannon, Colin Matthew, and Agatha Ramm. Of these, Shannon's life, of which the first volume only so far has appeared, is long (pp. xiv + 556): more a new Morley, than the student's friend. Matthew's life, like Shannon's, is for the present half complete; but where Shannon makes 1865 his terminus, Matthew reaches 1874 while still being manageably short (pp. xi + 275).

This leaves Dr. Ramm. She has had before her diaries up to 1880. While acknowledging a "very large" debt to Colin Matthew's introductions, she has drawn on her own Gladstonian research. There is another corpus of evidence where she leads the field: the neglected but voluminous printed works of Gladstone. Here she treats Gladstone as a wayward pupil, sometimes stringently, always justly, but showing why he must be taken seriously as classicist, Christian intellectual, social thinker, and man of letters. Her grasp of both the intrinsic merits of his Homeric studies, and of their contemporary political and religious implications, is as informed as it is lucidly expressed.

In proportion, clarity, succinctness, and width of view, Dr. Ramm excels. Hers is the ideal short but comprehensive introduction to Gladstone. It is a balanced view, not likely to stir controversy, and not marked by partisanship or undue reverence. It shows an easy command of the Victorian cultural and religious apparatus, as well as of public affairs. It even tells us when Gladstone was happy or unhappy, which is new. What emerges is an intellectually enriched version of Gladstone, as a man who spent infinite time on almost culpably miscellaneous reading (perhaps the single most important point to emerge from the diaries).

We now enter a diary-based phase of Gladstone scholarship. Dr. Ramm indeed says her book could not have written had the Gladstone Diaries not been published. For long the question has been whether the diaries would change everything. The short answer must be no. Too many "plums" had been leaked, from Morley onwards, to family-approved guardians of the shrine. Was there a richer stratum still to come? In terms of novelty or glamour, no; only painstaking sifting will extract gold from the dross. It is Colin Matthew, not Gladstone, who has made the published Diaries striking, by judicious addition of extraneous matter (the most vivid passages in the latest volume are lifted from the Derby diaries).

Dr. Ramm characterizes Gladstone in four ways. First, he was "immensely ambitious" (4), or "enormously ambitious" (34). "There is no doubt that Gladstone was out for power" (24). Secondly, "all his activity was deliberate, planned and recorded" (5); though deliberateness in personality, and a public life which Gladstone saw as a chapter of accidents, need not be mutually exclusive. Thirdly, he had a passion for unifying, systematizing, and generalizing. Fourthly, he was drawn to seek justice. (Did this, one has to ask, grow out of his closeness to a weak invalid mother and his remoteness from a masterful father?)

Dr. Ramm's disentangling of the 1850s is particularly happy. Six offers came from the elder Derby, six were rejected, some at the height of Gladstone's anti-Liberalism in church and state; which says more about Gladstone's perceived conservatism, Derby's offers or Gladstone's rejections? Interestingly, Dr. Ramm dates Gladstone's "middle period" as extending from 1851 to 1866, the earlier date being based on his discovery of popular sympathies, a sense of rapport with popular audiences, and a wish for a widening of national consensus, phenomena more traditionally dated as starting with Gladstone's Newcastle expedition of 1862. This merits exploration. One argument in favor of the earlier date is that it enables us to take into account the fruits of his Homeric studies in the 1850s: was it not Homer, Gladstone argued, who taught the virtues of government by discussion, as well as being "intensely national in feeling?"

Dr. Matthew, Lecturer in Gladstone Studies at Christ Church, Oxford, having excited our awe by editing the nearly 26,000 diary entries in what Gladstone always called his journal, has most usefully given us what we must hope is an interim report. As such, it is indispensable, while also being deeply original at a high intellectual level. He offers, he says, "an introduction to Gladstone, an extended biographical essay" which "makes no claim to be exhaustive or definitive." All the better for that, for the work has a unity which is not just biographical, but arises from uncluttered meditation on the nature of leadership in a modern society, considered in relation to God's plan. Not before, I think, has the religious element been so well fused with the public life.

All but two new chapters, and those the first, were written to introduce successive volumes of the Diaries, and their authority has long been recognized. They now stand before us, little altered, but in a rare combination of high scholarship and handiness. Space permits comment on but a few of Dr. Matthew's central judgments.

If Gladstone was a great Christian man, it was not, for Dr. Matthew, because he was a "saint." "His mother and sister ... possessed that Evangelical religious assurance, repose, and sense of grace which Gladstone never throughout his life gained. For him, awareness of sin ... was always uppermost, never its atoning opposite" (7). To have less grace than one's mother, and less money than one's father, is no small spur to exertion.

But it may be that, in the two fine chapters on Gladstone to 1841, Dr. Matthew underrates Gladstone's early Evangelicalism. To Matthew, "moderate" sums up the early Gladstone: moderate Evangelical, supporter of Catholic Emancipation, admirer of Canning, opponent of Wellington's premiership in 1830 and supporter of a moderate reform of Parliament, moderate enough to attend Roman Catholic services when abroad, diverse and curious in his schoolboy reading which went far outside the Evangelical culture.

All this is true enough: at Eton Gladstone fitted in, and did well out of doing so. The picture is one of happy normality, but some of the phases of Gladstone's youthful religious life--those seen not by Eton, but only by Liverpool and by his family--have been presented by the exhaustive researches of Dr. Jagger, Warden of St. Deiniol's Library, Hawarden, as Evangelical in a truly hot and strong sense, almost falling off the edge of the Anglican map. Perhaps the Matthew version is slightly too much Oxford on top, too little Liverpool below; certainly, not since G. M. Young have the merits of Christ Church been so confidently sung.

The Matthew method is to write Gladstone's political practice and theory, but on terms rather favorable to theory. If Gladstone's education engendered theory, in the sense of a unifying understanding of state, religion, nationhood, and social organization (but not economics: Dr. Matthew acutely remarks how hard it was in the 1830s to see the 1840s coming), then theory, to Matthew, engendered practice. It may be so, but this method, with its possible idealizing tendency, and its denial of the autonomy of political practice, has some dangers. If the primacy of theory were ever true for a politician, however, it was true of Gladstone in the 1830s, a blank decade were it not for a frenzy of theorizing. And yet, do his theories deserve much attention, except in the sense that they mattered to him, for did he not after great labor propose exactly what a post-Burke, post-Coleridge Conservative would propose or oppose, but with a larger tilt towards the Church? To mark out the 1830s as Gladstone's Christian phase, a mere quirky chapter in the making of a statesman, runs the risk of underestimating the fierceness of the Christian element in his maturity.

The Matthew version does yeoman service in respect of Gladstone's middle years, that awkward period between 1846 and 1850, when he was largely unemployed or underemployed. It was Matthew who first fully delineated the importance for Gladstone of being a financial technocrat who thought programmatically. This restored balance to Gladstone's middle life, by placing the negative side, with its admitted failures, sadnesses, and tensions, in their true context of intelligent and earnest public aspiration. What remains relatively unexplained, in the Matthew version, is Gladstone's move to Liberal politics in 1859, if only because it is one of the few things that Gladstone himself never sought to explain. One leaves Matthew's portrait of Gladstone before 1868 with a greater assurance that he was a born Chancellor than that he was a born prime minister; in other words, the traditional emphasis on the late-Victorian King Lear, venerable, tragic, but not master of his world, is well corrected.

Matthew's account of the 1868-74 ministry rests on two elements, both now staples of student teaching. It was a collegiate government, even a cabinet of chums, in sharp contrast to Gladstone's second ministry. Nobody in it aspired to Gladstone's job. And, contrary to what appears in hindsight, its legislative output was not programmatic; if system and purpose there was, it was financial. The myth, then, of the great reforming ministry crumbles, to be replaced, perhaps, by a truer picture of the great purposeful temperament, enforcing public business with many an inner reservation. Matthew, too, brings out, essentially for the first time, the passionate dalliance with Mrs. Thistlethwaite at the start of his first ministry, something which cannot quite be treated merely as a detour from the main story. In sum, then, we can but await avidly the second volume, now expected sooner rather than later.

The Diaries, by their apparent comprehensiveness, leave it to us to discover what they omit. Thus they do not record what newspapers Gladstone saw each day, a point of some importance. They record only two dreams, both in the 1830s, both of Christ. There is, I think, no direct comment on the nature, prospects, and merits of the Liberal party, as opposed to his long meditations on party as such. One may plausibly infer that for Gladstone the Liberal party, as opposed to certain financial and libertarian tenets, was a secondary phenomenon. What the Diariesdo not say may in some respects be as important as what they do.

One can hardly overestimate the extent to which the Diaries are a record of what Gladstone read. This can be mildly absurd. In 1885, with an election in prospect, he was learning Norwegian, while browsing through a study of Scottish dialect; in 1886, during the election itself, he was studying the Coptic liturgy. On the very eve of the 1886 polls, he was deep in Exploits and Anecdotes of the Scottish Gypsies. When on the brink of war with Russia in 1885, he was brooding over a dubious work on the incontinence of the French clergy. His holiday reading on his Norwegian voyage of August 1885 included a novel by W. D. Howells, Smith's Notes on ... Assyria and Babylonia (1872), the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, a work on trade depression, Thursfield's England and Ireland, the Annual Register for 1800--and the Arabian Nights. Lacking, indeed, amidst the intellectual gluttony, is any sense of canon, principle, or order; itinerant curiosity rules. Much, too, jars: Gladstone calls Jane Eyre "a remarkable but jarring book" while Middlemarchwas "an extraordinary, to me a very jarring book." The picture the Diaries paint is that of the eremitical student, thirsty for all knowledge, but not knowing what it was that he sought. A close comparison might be made with Disraeli's bookishness, where we have an equally curious, if unused, recording of his reading.

The surprise of the current volumes lies less within the text than in the introduction. One cannot say, for instance, that our knowledge of Home Rule in 1886 is changed radically: the deeper we dig, the more evasive all becomes, if only for lack of a central body of sources. Intensity there is, and patchiness, but the body of new knowledge making for decisive interpretation is not great. Eyes may light up at the citations from John Morley's private papers, long unavailable for study, but it should be understood that this was by private arrangement for the Diaries only, and does not reflect any new opportunity for access.

The new introduction is masterly at every level, and it will be required reading for all students of Gladstone's life and politics. Its easy synthesis of his second prime ministership is a joy to read. For this reviewer, it contained the biggest surprise of the Diaries to date: Gladstone speculated heavily in Egyptian bonds, and thereby made a small fortune out of his conquest of Egypt. Even if we see this as an additional explanation for his self-reproach and torment over Egypt, it is not hard to predict what the Egyptian view will be. In short, for those who wish it to be so, it is a bombshell, or equally, a tribute to the total honesty of the Gladstone Diaries Project.

The puzzle about Gladstone's Egyptian speculations is not whether they affected motive, which is unlikely, but their extraordinary rashness as an essay in personal finance. Matthew may say "his holdings were probably not unusual," nor "was there a code of practice or even a convention." This does not mean that there were no attitudes about what was becoming a highly sensitive area, especially in the backwash from the various City scandals of the 1870s. Across the Mersey at Knowsley, Derby never held foreign bonds; detested alleged stockjobbers like Decazes, when French premier, whom otherwise he approved; had some Indian stock, but sold it as too risky; and let his hair down only with some home railway debentures of the highest rating. His equities he sold on succeeding to the title, as unsuited to a public man. The thought of buying high-risk stock, let alone speculating heavily on Egyptian bonds, would never have crossed Derby's mind: he would have found Gladstone's speculations shocking. The charge against Gladstone is not that he made a large sum out of imperialism, but that he might as easily have lost what he could ill afford. To put matters in context, it should be noted that Gladstone, by his own calculation, had given 52,113 [pounds sterling] to religion and charity by 1885. On balance, Gladstone was probably as unconventional in his speculation as in his generosity.

"It is easy to write, but to write honestly nearly impossible." Thus wrote Gladstone in 1896, in nearly his last diary entry. For the historian, the difficulty lies not in questions of veracity, but in the subtle distortions involved in the centrality the Diaries will now have. This will always arise when one class of evidence comes, by majestic accident, to tower above others; but we would do well to recall how little we know of what Gladstone said in conversation, for instance. Even if we knew more of Gladstone's talk, we would have to remember, as Matthew points out, that even in private he spoke for the record: on his Norwegian voyage of 1885, no less than four diarists were hanging on his words. A stylized diary, stylized political letters, stylized table talk, all create a massive illusion of intimate acquaintance which may create, or even be meant to create, an impenetrable wall against knowledge.

University of Bristol