A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 2

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 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