His fifty years of public life had wrought his early habits of severe toil, method, exactness, concentration, into cast-iron. Whether they had sharpened what is called knowledge of the world, or taught him insight into men and skill in discrimination among men, it is hard to say. He always talked as if he found the world pretty much what he had expected. Man, he used often to say, is the least comprehensible of creatures, and of men the most incomprehensible are the politicians. Yet nobody was less of the cynic. As for Weltschmerz, world-weariness, ennui, tedium (M34) vitæ—that enervating family were no acquaintances of his, now nor at any time. None of the vicissitudes of long experience ever tempted him either into the shallow satire on life that is so often the solace of the little and the weak; or on the other hand into the _saeva indignatio_, the sombre brooding reprobation, that has haunted some strong souls from Tacitus and Dante to Pascal, Butler, Swift, Turgot. We may, indeed, be sure that neither of these two moods can ever hold a place in the breast of a commanding orator.
I have spoken of his new feeling for democracy. At the point of time at which we have arrived, it was heartily reciprocated. The many difficulties in the course of public affairs that confronted parliament and the nation for two years or more after Mr. Gladstone’s second accession to power, did little to weaken either his personal popularity or his hold upon the confidence of the constituencies. For many years he and Mr. Disraeli had stood out above the level of their adherents; they were the centre of every political storm. Disraeli was gone (April 19, 1881), commemorated by Mr. Gladstone in a parliamentary tribute that cost him much searching of heart beforehand, and was a masterpiece of grace and good feeling. Mr. Gladstone stood alone, concentrating upon himself by his personal ascendency and public history the bitter antagonism of his opponents, only matched by the enthusiasm and devotion of his followers. The rage of faction had seldom been more unbridled. The Irish and the young fourth party were rivals in malicious vituperation; of the two, the Irish on the whole observed the better manners. Once Mr. Gladstone was wounded to the quick, as letters show, when a member of the fourth party denounced as “a government of infamy” the ministry with whose head he had long been on terms of more than friendship alike as host and guest. He could not fell his trees, he could not read the lessons in Hawarden church, without finding these innocent habits turned into material for platform mockery. “In the eyes of the opposition, as indeed of the country,” said a great print that was never much his friend, “he is the government and he is the liberal party,” and the writer went on to scold Lord Salisbury for wasting his time in the concoction of angry epigrams and pungent phrases that were neither new nor instructive.(55) They pierced no joint in the mail of the warrior at whom they were levelled. The nation at large knew nothing of difficulties at Windsor, nothing of awkward passages in the cabinet, nothing of the trying egotisms of gentlemen out of the cabinet who insisted that they ought to be in. Nor would such things have made any difference except in his favour, if the public had known all about them. The Duke of Argyll and Lord Lansdowne had left him; his Irish policy had cost him his Irish secretary, and his Egyptian policy had cost him Mr. Bright. They had got into a war, they had been baffled in legislation, they had to raise the most unpopular of taxes, there had been the frightful tragedy in Ireland. Yet all seemed to have been completely overcome in the public mind by the power of Mr. Gladstone in uniting his friends and frustrating his foes, and the more bitterly he was hated by society, the more warmly attached were the mass of the people. Anybody who had foreseen all this would have concluded that the government must be in extremity, but he went to the Guildhall on the 9th of November 1882, and had the best possible reception on that famous stage. One tory newspaper felt bound to admit that Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues had rehabilitated themselves in the public judgment with astounding rapidity, and were now almost as strong in popular and parliamentary support as when they first took office.(56) Another tory print declared Mr. Gladstone to be stronger, more popular, more despotic, than at any time since the policy to carry out which he was placed in office was disclosed.(57) The session of 1882 had only been exceeded in duration by two sessions for fifty years.