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 and defining such principles, and then to pursue a series of logical deductions from them.They are, therefore, somewhat bolder reasoners than the English, less content to remain in the region of concrete facts, more eager to hasten on to the process of working out a body of speculative doctrines.The Englishman is apt to plume himself on being right in spite of logic; the Scotchman delights to think that it is through logic he has reached his conclusions, and that he can by logic defend them.These are qualities which Mr.
Gladstone drew from his Scottish blood.He had a keen enjoyment of the processes of dialectic.He loved to get hold of an abstract principle and to derive all sorts of conclusions from it.He was wont to begin the discussion of a question by laying down two or three sweeping propositions covering the subject as a whole, and would then proceed to draw from these others which he could apply to the particular matter in hand.His well-stored memory and boundless ingenuity made this finding of such general propositions so easy a task that a method in itself agreeable sometimes appeared to be carried to excess.He frequently arrived at conclusions which the judgment of the sober auditor did not approve, because, although they seemed to have been legitimately deduced from the general principles just enunciated, they were somehow at variance with the plain teaching of the facts.At such moments one felt that the man who was charming but perplexing Englishmen by his subtlety and ingenuity was not himself an Englishman in mental quality, but had the love for abstractions and refinements and dialectical analysis which characterizes the Scotch intellect.He had also a large measure of that warmth and vehemence, called in the sixteenth century the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum, which belong to the Scottish temperament, and particularly to the Celtic Scot.He kindled quickly, and when kindled, he shot forth a strong and brilliant flame.To any one with less power of self-control such intensity of emotion as he frequently showed would have been dangerous; nor did this excitability fail, even with him, to prompt words and acts which a cooler judgment would have disapproved.But it gave that spontaneity which was one of the charms of his nature;it produced that impression of profound earnestness and of resistless force which raised him out of the rank of ordinary statesmen.The tide of emotion swelling fast and full seemed to turn the whole rushing stream of intellectual effort into whatever channel lay at the moment nearest.
With these Scottish qualities, Mr.Gladstone was brought up at school and college among Englishmen, and received at Oxford, then lately awakened from a long torpor, a bias and tendency which never thereafter ceased to affect him.The so-called "Oxford Movement,"which afterward obtained the name of Tractarianism and carried Dr.
