A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 2

human story, and a natural, inbred sympathy for the
many against the few, for the unfortunate against the prosperous; it was
these ardors and the burning sincerity with which he felt them, that
made him so great a power among us, his juniors by half a generation. I
shall never lose the impression that _Compromise_, with its almost
savage appeal for sincerity in word and deed, made upon me--an
impression which had its share in Robert Elsmere.
But together with this tragic strenuousness there was always the
personal magic which winged it and gave it power. Mr. Morley has
known all through his life what it was to be courted, by men and
women alike, for the mere pleasure of his company; in which he

resembled another man whom both he and I knew well--Sir Alfred
Lyall. It is well known that Mr. Gladstone was fascinated by the
combination in his future biographer of the Puritan, the man of iron
conviction, and the delightful man of letters. And in my own small
sphere I realized both aspects of Mr. Morley during the 'eighties. Just
before we left Oxford I had begun to write reviews and occasional
notes for the _Pall Mall_, which he was then editing; after we settled in
London, and he had become also editor of _Macmillan_, he asked me,
to my no little conceit, to write a monthly causerie on a book or books
for that magazine. I never succeeded in writing nearly so many; but in
two years I contributed perhaps eight or ten papers--until I became
absorbed in Robert Elsmere and Mr. Morley gave up journalism for
politics. During that time my pleasant task brought me into frequent
contact with my editor. Nothing could have been kinder than his letters;
at the same time there was scarcely one of them that did not convey
some hint, some touch of the critical goad, invaluable to the recipient. I
wrote him a letter of wailing when he gave up the editorship and
literature and became Member for Newcastle. Such a fall it seemed to
me then! But Mr. Morley took it patiently. "Do not lament over your
friend, but pray for him!" As, indeed, one might well do, in the case of
one who for a few brief months--in 1886--was to be Chief Secretary for
Ireland, and again in 1892-95.
It was, indeed, in connection with Ireland that I became keenly and
personally aware of that other side of Mr. Morley's character--the side
which showed him the intransigent supporter of liberty at all costs and
all hazards. It was, I suppose, the brilliant and pitiless attacks in the
Pall Mall on Mr. Forster's Chief-Secretaryship, which, as much as
anything else, and together with what they reflected in the Cabinet,
weakened my uncle's position and ultimately led to his resignation in
the spring of 1882. Many of Mr. Forster's friends and kinsfolk resented
them bitterly; and among the kinsfolk, one of them, I have reason to
know, made a strong private protest. Mr. Morley's attitude in reply
could only have been that which is well expressed by a sentence of
Darmesteter's about Renan: "So pliant in appearance, so courteous in
manner, he became a bar of iron as soon as one sought to wrest from
him an act or word contrary to the intimate sense of his conscience."

But no man has a monopoly of conscience. The tragedy was that here
were two men, both democrats, both humanitarians, but that an
executive office, in a time of hideous difficulty, had been imposed
upon the one, from which the other--his critic--was free. Ten years later,
when Mr. Morley was Chief Secretary, it was pointed out that the same
statesman who had so sincerely and vehemently protested in the case of
William Forster and Mr. Balfour against the revival of "obsolete"
statutes, and the suppression of public meetings, had himself been
obliged to put obsolete statutes in operation sixteen times, and to
prohibit twenty-six public meetings. These, however, are the whirligigs
of politics, and no politician escapes them.
In my eyes Lord Morley's crowning achievement in literature is his
biography of Mr. Gladstone. How easy it would have been to smother
Mr. Gladstone in stale politics!--and how stale politics may become in
that intermediate stage before they pass finally into history! English
political literature is full of biography of this kind. The three notable
exceptions of recent years which occur to me are Mr. Churchill's Life of
his father, the Disraeli biography still in progress, and the Gladstone.
But it would be difficult indeed to "stale" the story of either Lord
Randolph or Dizzy. A biographer would have to set about it of malice
prepense. In the case, however, of Mr. Gladstone, the danger was more
real. Anglican orthodoxy, eminent virtue, unfailing