Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 | Page 3

literary subjects, and I
have seen him again and again hold a large audience spellbound when
his subject was Charlotte or Emily Brontë, Mrs. Carlyle, the Inner
Working of an English Newspaper, the Character of General Gordon,
or some other theme which appealed to him. He spoke rapidly and
clearly, and between the years 1882 and 1886 gave his services without
stint in this direction to the people of Leeds, Bradford, and other of the
Yorkshire towns. The manuscripts of these lectures are before me as I
write; they are all in his own hand, and they must have taken from an
hour to an hour and a half in delivery. Yet one of the most important of
them--it runs to between sixty and seventy closely written manuscript
pages, and bears no marks of haste--was, as a note in his own hand at
the outset shows, begun one day and finished the next--a proof, if any
were needed, of his rapidity in work. He made many enthusiastic
friends amongst the shrewd working people of the North by these
deliverances.

The last twenty years of my brother's life are outside the present
narrative. Two of them were spent in Leeds in ever-widening
newspaper work, and the remaining eighteen in London, under
circumstances he has himself described in another volume, which, for
political reasons, is for the present withheld. It will appear eventually,
and personally I feel no doubt whatever that it will take its place, quite
apart from its self-revelation, as one of the most important and
authentic records, in the political sense, of the later decades of Queen
Victoria's reign. My brother's knowledge of the secret history of the
Liberal party in the memorable days when Mr. Gladstone was fighting
his historic battle for Home Rule, and during the subsequent
Premiership of Lord Rosebery, was exceptional. He was the trusted
friend of both statesmen, and probably no other journalist was so
absolutely in the confidence of the leaders of the Liberal party--a
circumstance which was due quite as much to his character as to his
capacity. It is not my intention to anticipate the story, as he himself
tells it, either of the "Hawarden Kite" or the Home Rule split, much less
to disclose his opinions--they are emphatic and deliberate--of the men
who made mischief at that crisis. I leave also untouched the plain,
unvarnished account he gives, on unimpeachable authority, of a
subsequent and not less discreditable phase in the annals of the Liberal
party. There are reasons, obvious to everyone who gives the matter a
moment's thought, that render it inadvisable in the interests of the
political cause with which my brother all his life was identified, and for
which he suffered more than is commonly known, to yield to the very
natural temptation to throw reticence to the winds.
To one point only will I permit myself to make brief but significant
allusion, for I cannot allow this book to go forth to the world with the
knowledge that the publication of the companion volume is--through
force of circumstances--for the present postponed, without at least a
passing reference to what in the authoritative biography of Mr.
Gladstone is called the "barren controversy" which arose in 1892, as to
whether the present Duke of Devonshire, in 1880, tried to form a
Government. That controversy was assuredly "barren" to my brother in
everything but the testimony of a good conscience. He was assailed by
almost the whole Press of the country for the part which he played in it,
and not least mercilessly by journalists of his own party. As he said to

me himself at the time, "If I had been Mr. Parnell, fresh from the
revelations of the Divorce Court, I could not have been treated with
greater contumely." If there was one thing on the possession of which
he prided himself in life more than another, it was loyalty, and seldom
was political loyalty subjected to a more cruel strain. He held his peace
with all the materials for his own vindication in his hand, rather than
embarrass Mr. Gladstone at a great political crisis.
The letters on which he based his statements are in existence. I wished
to print them, without note or comment of mine, in an Appendix to the
present volume, but permission has been withheld. They cannot remain
for ever in ambush, and when they are published, with my brother's full
and magnanimous comments, it will be apparent to all the world how
greatly he was misjudged. It is enough for the present to say that Mr.
Gladstone himself admitted in a note under his own hand that the
interpretation which my brother put upon the facts submitted to him
absolutely and entirely justified the course which he took in that
controversy. Mr. Gladstone,