II DISRAELI AND PEEL 47 debates to be, and two English gentlemen can stand up before the English Commons to quote Virgil at each other, and round sentences, and show their fineness of wrist in their pretty little venomous carte and tierce of personality, while, even as they speak, the everlasting silence is wrapping the brave massacred Danes? I do not know, never shall know, how this is possible. . Mr. Gladstone must go to places, it seems, before he can feel. Let him go to Alsen, as he went to Naples, and quote Virgil to the Prussian army." And so forth, and so forth. But though Disraeli was in fact no more inclined than Mr. Gladstone to take the field against Prussia, Ruskin need not have included Mr. Disraeli in the sneer about Virgil. Mr. Gladstone on this occasion had the Aeneid to himself, and Mr. Disraeli very seldom quoted the classics in Parliament. He contented himself with laughing at Peel, whose life, he said, was one great appropriation clause, for borrowing his Latin quotations from earlier parliamentary speakers. Not that Mr. Disraeli was careless of the ancient classics. It was Aristotle, he said, "who has taught us most of the wise things we know"; his novels show that he had a great admiration for the "immortal voice" of Plato; and in public orations he quoted Sophocles. The quotation from Virgil last mentioned was the subject of an earlier parliamentary incident, and Mr. Gladstone may very probably have had it in mind. It is related of the elder Pitt that after one of his speeches he proceeded to leave the House, but as the doorkeeper was opening the door for him the Minister caught the words of a member announcing that he "rose to reply to the right hon. gentleman." Pitt in his masterful way gave the honourable member a freezing look, and as he hobbled back to his place was heard to murmur to himself the line : At Danaum proceres, etc. He took his seat and said, "Now let me hear what the hon. gentleman has to say to me." "Did any one laugh?" was asked of a member who described No," was the reply, we were too the scene. much awed." 1 Of quotations which may be called literary tags there was another instance in Mr. Gladstone's speech in the House of Commons on March 20, 1873. He had been defeated on the Irish University Bill, but Mr. Disraeli manœuvred him back to office, counting on the continuance of a range of extinct volcanoes to swell the ultimate triumph of their opponents. Mr. Gladstone was aware of the danger, and defended his course only as the lesser of two evils. "I do not think," he said, "that as a general rule the experience we have had in former years of what may be called returning or 1 Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, by Basil Williams, i. 273. II A TWO-EDGED QUOTATION 49 resuming governments has been very fortunate. It reminds me of that which was described by the Roman general according to the noble ode of Horace : Neque amissos colores Lana refert medicata fuco, Nec vera virtus, cum semel excidit, Lord Morley in recording the speech gives Mr. Can wool repair The colours that it lost when soaked with dye? No trick nor feint can serve as well. Even when so translated, the relevance of the passage was a little two-edged, and the scholarly conscience of the biographer compelled him to add in a note that "A rendering less apt for the occasion finds favour with some scholars, that true virtue can never be restored to those who have once fallen away from it." This is Conington's reading of the passage, for he translates : The hues of old Revisit not the wool we steep; Returns not to the worthless slave. It is curious to note, by the way, how various are the applications which different men find for the same passage of some well-remembered classic. Mr. Gladstone, as we have seen, applied the lines E of the great ode about Regulus to the case of a Government which reprieved itself from defeat. Ruskin applied the same lines to enforce his doctrines about education. "You do not educate a man," he said, "by telling him what he knew not, but by making him what he was not. And making him what he will remain for ever: for no wash of weeds will bring back the faded purple." Such use of the classics as is made in all these quotations shows how saturated Mr. Gladstone and his contemporaries were with Virgil and Horace, but does not exhibit the influence of the classics in their highest power. The case is very different with the most memorable of all Mr. Gladstone's quotations. This was his citation of Lucretius in the debate, during the Bradlaugh controversy, on the Affirmation Bill of 1883. The passage in which the lines from Lucretius are embedded is too long to be given here, and it may be found in Lord Morley's Life. Briefly put, the argument was this: Truth is the expression of the Divine mind in whose hands it may safely be left. Toleration is a method of securing truth. The preservation of the oath draws a line at the point of abstract denial of God, but does not touch that other form of irreligion which admits the existence of divinity but dissociates it from human affairs. And then came the famous passage: Many of II LUCRETIUS IN PARLIAMENT 51 the members of this House will recollect the majestic and noble lines: Omnis enim per se divom natura necessest Here the quotation was strictly apt, illustrating an 1 "For the nature of the gods must ever of itself enjoy repose supreme through endless time, far withdrawn from all concerns of ours; free from all our pains, free from all our perils, strong in resources of its own, needing nought from us, no favours win it, no anger moves (ii. 648, Lord Morley's translation). |