William Ewart Gladstone | Page 4

of subjects. He showed himself as eagerly
interested in matters of classical scholarship and Christian doctrine and
ecclesiastical history as in questions of national finance and foreign
policy. No account of him could be complete without reviewing his
actions and estimating the results of his work in all these directions.
But the difficulty of describing and judging him goes deeper. His was a
singularly complex nature, a character hard to unravel. His
individuality was extremely strong; all that he said or did bore its
impress. Yet it was an individuality so far from being self-consistent as
sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite qualities capriciously united in
a single person. He might with equal truth be called, and he has been in
fact called, a conservative and a revolutionary. He was dangerously
impulsive, and had frequently to suffer from his impulsiveness; yet he
was also not merely wary and cautious, but so astute as to have been
accused of craft and dissimulation. So great was his respect for
authority and tradition that he clung to views regarding the unity of
Homer and the historical claims of Christian sacerdotalism which the
majority of competent specialists have now rejected. So bold was he in
practical matters that he transformed the British constitution, changed
the course of English policy in the Orient, destroyed an established
church in one part of the United Kingdom, and committed himself to

the destruction of two established churches in two other parts. He came
near to being a Roman Catholic in his religious opinions, yet was for
twenty years the darling leader of the English Protestant
Nonconformists and the Scotch Presbyterians. No one who knew him
intimately doubted his conscientious sincerity and earnestness, yet four
fifths of the English upper classes were in his later years wont to regard
him as a self-interested schemer who would sacrifice his country to his
lust for power. Though he loved general principles, and often soared
out of the sight of his audience when discussing them, he generally
ended by deciding upon points of detail the question at issue. He was at
different times of his life the defender and the assailant of the same
institutions, yet he scarcely seemed inconsistent in doing opposite
things, because his method and his arguments preserved the same type
and color throughout. Any one who had at the beginning of his career
discerned in him the capacity for such strange diversities and
contradictions would probably have predicted that they must wreck it
by making his purposes weak and his course erratic. Such a prediction
would have proved true of any one with less firmness of will and less
intensity of temper. It was the persistent heat and vehemence of his
character, the sustained passion which he threw into the pursuit of the
object on which he was for the moment bent, that fused these dissimilar
qualities and made them appear to contribute to and to increase the total
force which he exerted.
CHAPTER II
: EARLY INFLUENCES

The circumstances of Mr. Gladstone's political career help to explain,
or, at any rate, will furnish occasion for the attempt to explain, this
complexity and variety of character. But before we come to his
manhood it is convenient to advert to three conditions whose influence
on him has been profound: the first his Scottish blood, the second his
Oxford education, the third his apprenticeship to public life under Sir
Robert Peel.

Theories of character based on race differences are dangerous, because
they are so easy to form and so hard to test. Still, no one denies that
there are qualities and tendencies generally found in the minds of men
of certain stocks, just as there are peculiarities in their faces or in their
speech. Mr. Gladstone was born and brought up in Liverpool, and
always retained a touch of Lancashire accent. But, as he was fond of
saying, every drop of blood in his veins was Scotch. His father was a
Lowland Scot from the neighborhood of Biggar, in the Upper Ward of
Lanarkshire, where the old yeoman's dwelling of Gledstanes--"the kite's
rock"--may still be seen. His mother was of Highland extraction, by
name Robertson, from Dingwall, in Ross-shire. Thus he was not only a
Scot, but a Scot with a strong infusion of the Celtic element, the
element whence the Scotch derive most of what distinguishes them
from the English. The Scot is more excitable, more easily brought to a
glow of passion, more apt to be eagerly absorbed in one thing at a time.
He is also more fond of abstract intellectual effort. It is not merely that
the taste for metaphysical theology is commoner in Scotland than in
England, but that the Scotch have a stronger relish for general
principles. They like to set out by ascertaining