Gladstone.

AFTER the young William Gladstone was beaten up by some sports in his rooms at Christ Church, Oxford, he confided to his diary: "Here I have great reason to be thankful to that God whose mercies fail not . . . 1) Because this incident must tend to the mortification of my pride, by God's grace. . . . It is no disgrace to be beaten for Christ was buffeted and smitten. . . . 2) Because here I have to some small extent an opportunity of exercising the duty of forgiveness." His letter proposing marriage to his future wife contained a 140-word sentence about the Almighty. "Oh, William dear," she would later say, "if you weren't such a great man you would be a terrible bore."

But he was a great man, and there is nothing boring about Roy Jenkins's wise and entertaining biography of the man who bestrode Britain for an astonishingly long time when Britain bestrode the world. Jenkins, a seasoned politician (he was home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer in Labour governments), calls Gladstone the dominant parliamentarian of the century when British democracy blossomed and "the most remarkable specimen of humanity" of all the fifty prime ministers since Walpole. "He was in many ways the greatest figure of the nineteenth century, and taken in the round the greatest British politician of that or any other parliamentary century."

Jenkins's biography is just right for American readers right now. There is a deflating smallness to present-day American politics. Gladstone's story is powerful proof that there is no necessary connection between democracy and vulgarity, and that popular government can accommodate a political career both elegant and passionate.

This biography has the amplitude of a Victorian novel, but not more bulk than is necessary to cover the nearly 89 years of the man who, more even than the Sovereign whose name denotes the era, is emblematic of the era's two dominant traits, earnestness and energy. He could, Jenkins says, do more in 4 hours than others could do in 16, and he worked 16 hours a day. He played strenuously, too. On a Norwegian vacation at age 75 he walked 18 miles in one day over rough terrain, and on another he started to learn Norwegian. Two years earlier he had completed a 20-mile hike in the Scottish mountains in less than 8 hours.

Born in 1809 to a prosperous merchant, he was educated at Eton ("we knew very little indeed, but we knew it accurately") and Oxford (where he earned a double first, and heard Newman's sermons at the University Church, St. Mary's on High Street). He sat in Parliament for 62 years with only a twenty-month break in 1846 -47. He was a cabinet minister at 33, the third youngest (after Pitt and Harold Wilson) in 250 years of British cabinets. Four times prime minister, the last time at age 83, he twice was prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer simultaneously.

Leaders of democracies generally are enlarged and pulled to greatness only by the demands of office during war. However, Gladstone achieved greatness during the years of almost continuous peace (other than the constant skirmishes of a colonial power) between Waterloo and the Boer War. But the nineteenth century's political and intellectual ferment caused Britain's domestic tranquillity to be roiled by controversies large enough to be, as summoners of greatness, the moral equivalents of war. The issues included how church and state should relate, how broadly access to the franchise should be extended, how a civilized nation should respond to genocide that does not implicate the nation's vital material interests, and, regarding the great dilemma of Gladstone's long twilight years, how to respond to the fact that (in Jenkins's words) "the maintenance of the liberal state was incompatible with holding within its centralized grip a large disaffected community of settled mind."

Gladstone began his public career an unbending Tory, convinced that a confessional state was both practicable and desirable. He even believed that anyone who was not a communicating member of the Church of England should be ineligible for public-service jobs. Jenkins notes drily, "The plenitude of Gladstone's extremity was underlined by his one 'moderate' concession: the doctrine might be difficult to apply in India." Gladstone was, Jenkins believes, "by some criteria the only dedicated Anglican ever to occupy 10 Downing Street." He read the Bible daily, often in Greek (he was able to communicate in all the principal languages of Europe), and usually attended two, and sometimes three, sermons on Sundays.

Religion was for him a constant reproach: "And this day I am forty years old. Forty years long hath God been grieved with me --hath with much long suffering endured me!" On his 58th birthday: "Another year of mercies unworthily received is added to the sum of my days: of wanderings and backslidings." On his 70th: "Alas the poor little garden of my own soul remains uncultivated, unweeded, defaced."

He felt deeply about, and plunged deeply into, liturgical disputes. And the nation felt deeply when, in 1850, Rome re-established the Catholic hierarchy in England for the first time since 1584. He was grieved by Newman's embrace of the Roman Church, an institution that at one point he denounced as "an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism and one dead level of religious subservience." He sold 150,000 copies of a pamphlet denouncing ultramontane Catholicism. But in his mature years he lost faith, Jenkins says, "not in God, but in the ability of any government or state to act as an agent of God."

At the beginning of his career his conservatism caused him to write that the fall of the Roman Empire was a result of the corruption inherent in secret voting. By the end of his career he had helped preside over a dramatic broadening of democracy, which took some curious turns, such as repealing duties on paper. This (Jenkins calls it the "removal of a tax on popular knowledge") was detested by the House of Lords because it produced cheap books and newspapers.

Still, Gladstone was never a liberal in the modern manner. Some reviewers of Jenkins's book, looking for what America currently lacks, a heroic liberal, have tried to present Gladstone as a precursor of today's liberalism. They have a lot to ignore, such as: "I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle -- the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inequalitarian." He certainly did not subscribe to the central tenet of modern liberalism, that state power is properly used to reduce inequality.

As he grew older he did claim to speak for "the masses against the classes," and he vigorously denounced London's "West End." (Today that phrase denotes the theater district; then it was an epithet akin to "inside the Beltway.") But he did not pander to "the people." As Jenkins says, "The flattery lay in assuming their seriousness and judgmental capacity." This "elevated but nonetheless popular politician" was the first great platform campaigner of modern democracy, capable of riveting the attention of a crowd of 25,000 -- this before electronic amplification. There was, of course, his manner -- "his flashing eye and the eagle's swoop of his cadences" -- but there was more:

There was also some feeling that he was on their side, not in the sense of an economic class struggle, for he was never strong on the social condition of the people, but in the sense that he was for seriousness against cynicism, for moral purpose against frivolity, for the achievements of industrial and industrious Britain at a time when it was supreme in these respects, and also in some sense for the solid striving of the northern provincial centers as against the glitter of London and the soft landscape and more traditional society of the South of England.

Disraeli's wit, and the cynical flattery ("we authors, Ma'am") with which he won the affection that the Queen withheld from Gladstone, are unattractive -- indeed, repellent -- in the context of the debate about what response Britain should make to Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria. Disraeli sardonically dismissed Gladstone's pamphlet on the subject (it sold 200,000 copies) as "of all the Bulgarian horrors perhaps the greatest" and was skeptical as to whether "torture had been practiced on a great scale amongst an Oriental people who . . . generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner."

Compare what Jenkins calls Disraeli's "mordant and provocative flippancies" to Gladstone's "pulsating moral indignation": "There is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not arise and overboil at the recital of that which has been done . . . another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood . . ."

IRELAND'S dark and bloody ground produced Gladstone's grandest moment and greatest failure. Like Peel, who broke his party for principle (free trade), Gladstone shattered his party over his proposal for Home Rule in Ireland. Unlike Peel, he failed to carry his principle. He believed that Ireland's volatile compound of agrarian and ethnic stresses meant that the only alternatives to Home Rule were military reconquest or the violent break-up of the United Kingdom. Perhaps there never was a realistic hope of derailing the train of events that led to Yeats's "terrible beauty" of Easter 1916. As Jenkins says, Gladstone's Herculean task was to get his largely Nonconformist Liberal Party to hand over Ireland to a Catholic regime that probably would construct a confessional state. What seems clear is that in Gladstone's day Ireland was corrupting the polity much as Algeria corrupted France in the 1950s.

Because of the passions aroused by the Irish question, Gladstone required a bodyguard -- the first prime minister to do so since the social unrest following the Napoleonic wars. Once he was knocked down by a cow; the cow was subsequently shot, and its head displayed in a pub near Gladstone's home. A wreath arrived with a card that read, "To the memory of the patriotic cow which sacrificed its life in an attempt to save Ireland from Home Rule." The wreck of Gladstone's hopes, partly because of Parnell's adultery with Mrs. O'Shea, is the stuff of tragedy.

Tragedy is foreshadowed in Gladstone's last act of obduracy, his resistance to increased naval expenditures: "If I stood alone in the world on this question, I could not be moved: so strongly am I convinced that this large increase to the Navy will lead to disaster in Europe." Something sure did. Gladstone's life was replete with episodes that resonate strangely, as in his diary entry about a "beautiful river walk" with "a Fuhrer . . . who was a charming specimen of those bold hardy active South Bavarians." The destination of the walk? Berchtesgaden.

That diary -- Jenkins calls it Gladstone's "account book with God for his expenditure of 'the most precious gift of time"' --makes possible an astonishingly detailed knowledge of Gladstone's life, such as his voracious consumption of twenty thousand books, including the nineteenth century's torrent of high-quality fiction -- Middlemarch, Vivian Grey, Romola, and on and on and on. His life brushed up against the lives of Trollope, Darwin, Hardy. He meticulously noted all his "rescues." Those were his strange nocturnal wanderings -- he kept at them for decades, into his seventies -- to find prostitutes he could ply with hot chocolate and reason. There is no record of his success in getting them off the streets and onto the path of righteousness. The cauldron of his sexuality -- he tormented his conscience by browsing for pornography in Munich bookstores -- seems to interest today's historians more than his statecraft ever could.

In 1858 he published three volumes on Homer. While chancellor of the exchequer, he wrote a 15,000-word essay on Tennyson. He wrote a long riposte to T. H. Huxley on the relationship of the Book of Genesis to modern scientific knowledge. Late in his life felling trees with an axe became a favorite outlet for his overflowing energy. "The forest laments, in order that Mr. Gladstone may perspire," sniffed Lord Randolph Churchill, and the forest went on lamenting until Gladstone gave up the axe one week shy of 82. When his eyesight began to fail (one eye was seriously injured when struck by a piece of gingerbread hurled by a woman who was angry about something unrecorded) and nighttime reading became difficult, he took up backgammon to keep busy.

When his fourth premiership ended in his 84th year, he published an edition of the works of a favorite bishop, wrote his own 150,000-word volume of theology, and published his translation of the Odes of Horace. Such astonishments crop up constantly in Jenkins's book. And when dry-as-dust pages about, say, the disestablishment of the Irish church seem about to make you sneeze, Jenkins's wit banishes tedium.

Here is his description of Gladstone's style of courtship: "Gladstone persuaded himself that her religious position was satisfactory, but may well have overestimated the aphrodisiacal effect of telling her this." Here is Jenkins on the effect in England of the surge of American exports produced by the economic recovery from the Civil War, completion of the transcontinental railroad, and development of refrigerated ships: "In England this produced falling rent-rolls and the first touches of austerity for those rural magnates who were not able to make up by the importation of rich American wives for the adverse effects of wheat and beef from the same source."

Jenkins is amusing about Gladstone's often convoluted rhetoric, in which "the subordinate clauses hung like candelabra." About one speech, Jenkins writes that "No one was much the wiser at the end, but his opacity at least had the advantage that the danger of bitterness was drowned in incomprehension." However, Jenkins gives Gladstone his considerable due as a giant of democracy because of the grandeur his rhetoric gave to public occasions. Here, for example, is Gladstone speaking in the House of Commons about his transition to the Liberal Party:

I came among you an outcast from those with whom I associated, driven from them, I admit, by no arbitrary act, but by the slow and resistless forces of conviction. I came among you, to make use of the legal phraseology, in pauperis forma. I had nothing to offer you but faithful and honorable service. You received me, as Dido received the shipwrecked Aeneas -- "Ejectum littore egentum/Excepi" [an exile on my shore I sheltered]. And I only trust you may not hereafter at any time say "Et regni demens in parte locavi" [and, fool as I was, I shared with you my realm].

To open Jenkins's book is to begin a protracted, but not too much so, stay in the company of a fabulous personality and noble spirit. When you close it you may be melancholy, so stark is the contrast between the best of democratic politics then and now. But perhaps you will be inspirited by the thought that things have not always been, and need not always be, as they are.