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GLADSTONE'S SELF-FORGETFULNESS 2'5
ments as so much pestilent juggling with truth. It was
his only chance. If Gladstone had combined the use of
massive and simple argument with his unrivalled power
of moral appeal and all his other superb gifts he could
have led the whole nation captive at his will.
When we come to consider his character, a difficulty
meets us at the outset. We must grant the element of
sophistry in discussion, for, as I have said, it was apparent
in private no less than in public life, but we have to reconcile
it with a transparent and very beautiful simplicity.
Be was one of the very few men I have ever known to
'Whom the subject of himself, in conversation, was simply
boring. Great saints are pained by the topic, and one
can trace the fading scars of con1licts waged with the ego
long ago. A journalist once remarked on a similarity of
temperament In Gladstone and Montagu Butler. Certainly
in this respect, but in no other. Almost by itself
it would have justiJI.ed Lord Salisbury's fine encomium in
1898 on his formidable antagonist as " a great Christian
man!'
Could any scene he more compelling than the incident
my brother Alfred told of a walk he took with the G.O.M.
at Hawarden, when, soon after the start, the latter interrupted
the copious talk by stopping outside a cottage in
which lay an old labourer dying? From outside Alfred
saw the picture of the white-haired statesman kneeling
by the sick man's bedside and with the beautiful face
uplifted. while words simple, stately, and sincere were
being uttered in the deep expressive tones that had touched
the hearts of listening millions in every comer of the land.
But more Impressive, more eloquent of the higher life, was
the utterly genuine self-forgetfulness with which he
presently rose up and resumed the conversation, wholly
unconscious that he bad been acting differently from the
common run of men.
Again, as his biographer has pointed out, he gave a
noble example of asceticism, in the scuse that whatever
pleasure of sense he thought it behoved him to forgo