Two faults natural to a strong man and an excitable man were commonly charged on him--an overbearing disposition and an irritable temper.Neither charge was well founded.Masterful he certainly was, both in speech and in action.His ardent manner, the intensity of his look, the dialectical vigor with which he pressed an argument, were apt to awe people who knew him but slightly, and make them abandon resistance even when they were unconvinced.A gifted though somewhat erratic politician used to tell how he once fared when he had risen in the House of Commons to censure some act of the ministry."I had not gone on three minutes when Gladstone turned round and gazed at me so that I had to sit down in the middle of a sentence.I could not help it.There was no standing his eye."But he neither meant nor wished to beat down his opponents by mere authority.One of the ablest of his private secretaries, who knew him as few people did, once observed: "When you are arguing with Mr.Gladstone, you must never let him think he has convinced you unless you are really convinced.Persist in repeating your view, and if you are unable to cope with him in skill of fence, say bluntly that for all his ingenuity and authority you think he is wrong, and you retain your own opinion.If he respects you as a man who knows something of the subject, he will be impressed by your opinion, and it will afterward have due weight with him." In his own cabinet he was willing to listen patiently to everybody's views, and, indeed, in the judgment of some of his colleagues, was not, at least in his later years, sufficiently strenuous in asserting and holding to his own.It is no secret that some of the most important decisions of the ministry of 1880-85 were taken against his judgment, though when they had been adopted he, of course, defended them in Parliament as if they had received his individual approval.
Nor, although he was extremely resolute and tenacious, did he bear malice against those who foiled his plans.He would exert his full force to get his own way, but if he could not get it, he accepted the position with dignity and good temper.He was too proud to be vindictive, too completely master of himself to be betrayed, even when excited, into angry words.Whether he was unforgiving and overmindful of injuries, it was less easy to determine, but those who had watched him most closely held that mere opposition or even insult did not leave a permanent sting, and that the only thing he could not forget or forgive was faithlessness or disloyalty.Like his favorite poet, he put the traditori in the lowest pit, although, like all practical statesmen, he often found himself obliged to work with those whom he distrusted.His attitude toward his two chief opponents well illustrates this feature of his character.He heartily despised Disraeli, not because Disraeli had been in the habit of attacking him, as one could easily perceive from the way he talked of those attacks, but because he thought Disraeli habitually untruthful, and considered him to have behaved with incomparable meanness to Peel.Yet he never attacked Disraeli personally, as Disraeli often attacked him.There was another of his opponents of whom he entertained an especially bad opinion, but no one could have told from his speeches what that opinion was.For Lord Salisbury he seemed to have no dislike at all, though Lord Salisbury had more than once insulted him.On one occasion (in 1890) he remarked to a colleague who had said something about the prime minister's offensive language: "I have never felt angry at what Salisbury has said about me.His mother was very kind to me when I was quite a young man, and I remember Salisbury as a little fellow in a red frock rolling about on the ottoman." His leniency toward another violent tongue which frequently assailed him, that of Lord Randolph Churchill, was not less noteworthy.
