Part 3 (1/2)
Of the city of Oxford, where Oxford University is situated, Matthew Arnold writes: ”Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, or whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us near to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection--to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side.”
Describing Christ Church College, a writer has said that there is no other College where a man has so great a choice of society, or a man entire freedom in choosing it.
As to the studies required, a greater stress was laid upon a knowledge of the Bible and of the evidences of Christianity than upon cla.s.sical literature; some proficiency was required also, either in mathematics or the science of reasoning. The system of education accommodated itself to the capacity and wants of the students, but the man of talent was at no loss as to a field for his exertions, or a reward for his industry. The honors of the ministry were all within his reach. In the cultivation of taste and general information Oxford afforded every opportunity, but the modern languages were not taught.
An interesting fact is related of young Gladstone when he entered Oxford, as to his studies at the university. He wrote his father that he disliked mathematics, and that he intended to concentrate his time and attention upon the cla.s.sics. This was a great blow to his father, who replied that he did not think a man was a man unless he knew mathematics. The dutiful son yielded to his father's wishes, abandoned his own plan, and applied himself with energy and success to the study of mathematics. But for this change of study he might not have become the greatest of Chancellors of the Exchequer.
Gladstone's instructors at Oxford were men of reputation. Rev. Robert Biscoe, whose lectures on Aristotle attracted some of the best men to the university, was his tutor; he attended the lectures of Dr. Burton on Divinity, and of Dr. Pusey on Hebrew, and read cla.s.sics privately with Bishop Wordsworth. He read steadily but not laboriously. Nothing was ever allowed to interfere with his morning's work. He read for four hours, and then took a walk. Though not averse to company and suppers, yet he always read for two or three hours before bedtime.
Among the undergraduates at Oxford then, who became conspicuous, were Henry Edward Manning, afterwards Cardinal Archbishop; Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury; Sidney Herbert, Robert Lowe, Lord Sherbrooke, and Lord Selborne. ”The man who _took_ me most,” says a visitor to Oxford in 1829, ”was the youngest Gladstone of Liverpool--I am sure a very superior person.”
Gladstone's chosen friends were all steady and industrious men, and many of them were more distinctively religious than is generally found in the life of undergraduates. And his choice of a.s.sociates in this respect was the subject of criticism on the part of a more secularly minded student who wrote, ”Gladstone has mixed himself up with the St. Mary Hall and Oriel set, who are really, for the most part, only fit to live with maiden aunts and keep tame rabbits.” And the question, Which was right--Gladstone or the student? may be answered by another, Which one became Prime Minister of England?
”Gladstone's first rooms were in the 'old library,' near the hall; but for the greater part of his time he occupied the right-hand rooms on the first floor of the first staircase, on the right as the visitor enters Canterbury gate. He was, alike in study and in conduct, a model undergraduate, and the great influence of his character and talents was used with manly resolution against the riotous conduct of the 'Tufts,'
whose brutality caused the death of one of their number in 1831. We read this note in the correspondence of a friend: 'I heard from Gladstone yesterday; he says that the number of gentlemen commoners has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.' Every one who has experienced the hubristic qualities of the Tufted race, and its satellites, will cordially sympathize with this sentiment of an orderly and industrious undergraduate. He was conspicuously moderate in the use of wine. His good example in this respect affected not only his contemporaries but also his successors at the university; men who followed him to Oxford ten years later found it still operative, and declare that undergraduates drank less in the forties, because Gladstone had been courageously abstemious in the thirties.”
But there were those who better estimated Gladstone's worth and looked approvingly upon his course, as ”the blameless schoolboy became the blameless undergraduate; diligent, sober, regular alike in study and devotion, giving his whole energies to the duties of the place, and quietly abiding in the religious faith in which he had been trained.
Bishop Charles Wordsworth said that no man of his standing in the university habitually read his Bible more or knew it better. Cardinal Manning described him walking in the university with his 'Bible and Prayer-book tucked under his arm.' ... He quitted Oxford with a religious belief still untinctured by Catholic theology. But the great change was not far distant, and he had already formed some of the friends.h.i.+ps which, in their development were destined to effect so profoundly the course of his religious thought.”
In reference to the religious and political opinions and influences prevailing at Oxford, it may be remarked that the atmosphere of Oxford was calculated to strengthen Mr. Gladstone's conservative views, and did have this effect, and as English statesmen had not then learned to put their trust in the people, the cause of reform found few or no friends at the university, and he was among those hostile to it, and was known for his p.r.o.nounced Tory and High Church opinions.
He belonged to the famous debating society known as the Oxford Union, was a brilliant debater, and in 1831 was its secretary, and later its president. On various occasions he carried, by a majority of one only, a motion that the Wellington Administration was undeserving of the confidence of the country; he defended the results of the Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation; he opposed a motion for the removal of Jewish disabilities, and he persuaded 94 students out of 130 to condemn Earl Grey's Reform Bill as a measure ”which threatened not only to change the form of government, but ultimately to break up the very foundation of social order.” His last speech at Oxford was in support of his own amendment to a motion for the immediate emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves in the West Indies. On a certain occasion he entertained a party of students from Cambridge, consisting of Sir Francis Doyle, Monckton Milnes, Sunderland, and Arthur H. Hallam, who discussed among them the superiority of Sh.e.l.ley over Byron as a poet. The motion was opposed by one Oxonion, the late Cardinal Manning, but Sh.e.l.ley received 90 votes to 33 for Byron.
One who heard the debate on the Reform Bill says that ”it converted Alston, the son of the member in Parliament for Hertford, who immediately on the conclusion of Gladstone's speech walked across from the Whig to the Tory side of the house, amidst loud acclamations.”
Another who was present writes, ”Most of the speakers rose, more or less, above their usual level, but when Mr. Gladstone sat down we all of us felt that an epoch in our lives had occurred. It certainly was the finest speech of his that I ever heard.” And Bishop Charles Wordsworth writes his experience of Mr. Gladstone at this time, ”made me feel no less sure than of my own existence that Gladstone, our then Christ-Church undergraduate, would one day rise to be Prime Minister of England.”
In the spring of 1832 Mr. Gladstone quitted Oxford. In summing up results it may be said, in the language of Mr. Russell: ”Among the purely intellectual effects produced on Mr. Gladstone by the discipline of Oxford, it is obvious to reckon an almost excessive exactness in the statement of propositions, a habit of rigorous definition, a microscopic care in the choice of words, and a tendency to a.n.a.lyze every sentiment and every phrase, and to distinguish with intense precaution between statements almost exactly similar. From Aristotle and Bishop Butler and Edmund Burke he learned the value of authority, the sacredness of law, the danger of laying rash and inconsiderate hands upon the ark of State.
In the political atmosphere of Oxford he was taught to apply these principles to the civil events of his time, to dread innovation, to respect existing inst.i.tutions, and to regard the Church and the Throne as inseparably a.s.sociated by Divine ordinance.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: Gladstone's London Home]
CHAPTER III
EARLY PARLIAMENTARY EXPERIENCES
It is customary for the sons of gentlemen who graduate at Cambridge and Oxford to spend some time in travel on the continent upon the completion of their university studies. The custom was observed in Mr. Gladstone's early days even more than at the present. In accordance then with the prevailing usage he went abroad after graduating at Oxford. In the spring of 1832 he started on his travels and spent nearly the whole of the next six months in Italy, ”learning the language, studying the art, and revelling in the natural beauties of that glorious land.” In the following September, however, he was suddenly recalled to England to enter upon his first Parliamentary campaign.
At Oxford Toryism prevailed, and was of the old-fas.h.i.+oned type, far removed from the utilitarian conservatism of the present day. Charles I was a saint and a martyr, the claims of rank and birth were admitted with a childlike simplicity, the high functions of government were the birthright of the few, and the people had nothing to do with the laws, except to obey them. Mr. Gladstone was a Tory. The political views he held upon leaving Oxford had much to do with his recall from abroad and his running for a seat in the House of Commons. Of these opinions held by him then, and afterwards repudiated, he, in a speech delivered at the opening of the Palmerston Club, Oxford, in December, 1878, says: ”I trace in the education of Oxford of my own time one great defect.
Perhaps it was my own fault; but I must admit that I did not learn, when at Oxford, that which I have learned since, viz., to set a due value on the imperishable and inestimable principles of human liberty. The temper which, I think, too much prevailed in academic circles, was that liberty was regarded with jealousy and fear, which could not be wholly dispensed with, but which was continually to be watched for fear of excess.... I think that the principle of the Conservative party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear; but I think the policy of the Liberal party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence. I can only a.s.sure you, gentlemen, that now I am in front of extended popular privileges. I have no fear of those enlargements of the Const.i.tution that seem to be approaching. On the contrary, I hail them with desire. I am not in the least degree conscious that I have less reverence for antiquity, for the beautiful, and good, and glorious charges that our ancestors have handed down to us as a patrimony to our race, than I had in other days when I held other political opinions. I have learnt to set the true value upon human liberty, and in whatever I have changed, there, and there only, has been the explanation of the change.”
It was Mr. Gladstone's Tory principles that led to an invitation from the Duke of Newcastle, whose son, the Earl of Lincoln, afterwards a member of Lord Aberdeen's Cabinet during the Crimean War, had been his schoolmate at Eton and Oxford, and his intimate friend; to return to England and to contest the representation of Newark in Parliament. In accordance with this summons he hurried home.
Let us review the national situation. It was a time of general alarm and uncertainty, from political unrest, commercial stagnation, and devastating pestilence. ”The terrors of the time begat a hundred forms of strange fanaticism; and among men who were not fanatics there was a deep and wide conviction that national judgments were overtaking national sins, and that the only hope of safety for England lay in a return to that practical recognition of religion in the political sphere at the proudest moments of English history. 'The beginning and the end of what is the matter with us in these days,' wrote Carlyle, 'is that we have forgotten G.o.d.'”
England was in a condition of great political excitement and expectancy.
One of the greatest battles in Parliamentary history had just been fought and won by the people. The Reform Bill, which admitted large cla.s.ses, hitherto unrepresented, to the right of citizens.h.i.+p, had pa.s.sed, after a long struggle, during which law and order were defied and riots prevailed in various parts of the kingdom.
The King clearly perceiving that the wish of the people could no longer be disregarded with safety, and heedless of the advice of the aristocracy, gave his a.s.sent to the measure. This bill, which became a law June 7, 1832, ”transformed the whole of the Electoral arrangements of the United Kingdom.” It was demanded that the King be present in the House of Lords to witness the ceremony of the subjugation of his crown and peers, as it was deemed, but the King, feeling he had yielded enough to the popular will, refused. Walpole, in his history, writes: ”King and Queen sat sullenly apart in their palace. Peer and country gentleman moodily awaited the ruin of their country and the destruction of their property. Fanaticism still raved at the wickedness of a people; the people, clamoring for work, still succ.u.mbed before the mysterious disease which was continually claiming more and more victims. But the nation cared not for the sullenness of the Court, the forebodings of the landed cla.s.ses, the ravings of the pulpit, or even the mysterious operations of a new plague. The deep gloom that had overshadowed the land had been relieved by one single ray. The victory had been won. The bill had become law.”