A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 3

decorum; a
comparatively weak sense of humor, and a literary gift much inferior to
his oratorical gift, so that the most famous of his speeches are but cold
reading now; interminable sentences, and an unfailing relish for detail
all important in its day, but long since dead and buried; the kind of
biography that, with this material, half a dozen of Mr. Gladstone's
colleagues might have written of him, for all his greatness, rises
formidably on the inward eye. The younger generation waiting for the
historian to come--except in the case of those whose professional duty
as politicians it would have been to read it--might quite well have
yawned and passed by.
But Mr. Morley's literary instinct, which is the artistic instinct, solved
the problem. The most interesting half of the book will always, I think,
be the later half. In the great matters of his hero's earlier career--Free

Trade, the Crimean War, the early budgets, the slow development of
the Liberal leader from the Church and State Conservative of 1832,
down to the franchise battle of the 'sixties and the "great Ministry," as
Mr. Morley calls it, of 1868, the story is told, indeed, perhaps here and
there at too great length, yet with unfailing ease and lucidity. The teller,
however, is one who, till the late 'seventies, was only a spectator, and,
on the whole, from a distance, of what he is describing, who was
indeed most of the time pursuing his own special aims--i.e., the hewing
down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with the preaching of a frank
and uncompromising agnosticism, in the _Fortnightly Review_; aims
which were, of all others, most opposed to Mr. Gladstone's. But with
the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley becomes a great part of
what he tells. During the intermediate stage--marked by his editorship
of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--the tone of the biography grows sensibly
warmer and more vivid, as the writer draws nearer and nearer to the
central scene; and with Mr. Morley's election to Newcastle and his
acceptance of the Chief-Secretaryship in 1885, the book becomes the
fascinating record of not one man, but two, and that without any
intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. The dreariness of
the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch that only Mr. Morley
could have given. Take that picture of the somber, discontented Parnell,
coming, late in the evening, to Mr. Morley's room in the House of
Commons, to complain of the finance of the Home Rule Bill--Mr.
Gladstone's entrance at 10.30 P.M., after an exhausting day--and he, the
man of seventy-seven, sitting down to work between the Chief
Secretary and the Irish leader, till at last, with a sigh of weariness at
nearly 1 A.M., the tired Prime Minister pleads to go to bed. Or that
most dramatic story, later on, of Committee Room No. 15, where Mr.
Morley becomes the reporter to Mr. Gladstone of that moral and
political tragedy, the fall of Parnell; or a hundred other sharp lights
upon the inner and human truth of things, as it lay behind the political
spectacle. All through the later chapters, too, the happy use of
conversations between the two men on literary and philosophical
matters relieves what might have been the tedium of the end. For these
vivid notes of free talk not only bring the living Gladstone before you
in the most varied relation to his time; they keep up a perpetually
interesting comparison in the reader's mind between the hero and his

biographer. One is as eager to know what Mr. Morley is going to say as
one is to listen to Mr. Gladstone. The two men, with their radical
differences and their passionate sympathies, throw light on each other,
and the agreeable pages achieve a double end, without ever affecting
the real unity of the book. Thus handled, biography, so often the drudge
of literature, rises into its high places and becomes a delight instead of
an edifying or informing necessity.
I will add one other recollection of this early time--i.e., that in 1881 the
reviewing of Mr. Morley's Cobden in the Times fell to my husband, and
as those were the days of many-column reviews, and as the time given
for the review was exceedingly short, it could only be done at all by a
division of labor. We divided the sheets of the book, and we just
finished in time to let my husband rush off to Printing House Square
and correct the proofs as they went through the press for the morning's
issue. In those days, as is well known, the Times went to press much
later than now, and a leader-writer rarely got home before 4, and
sometimes 5, A.M.
* * * * *
I find it extremely difficult, as I