A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 3

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.
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I find it extremely difficult, as I look back, to put any order into the crowding memories of those early years in London. They were extraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. At home our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out into new activities and bringing us always