Gladstone, of everything except his own greedy desire
for personal revenge and triumph.
[Sidenote: Mr. Gladstone's gentleness.]
This was what lay behind the plausible and honeyed words in which Mr.
Chamberlain attacked the article in the _Daily News_. And here a curious
difficulty arose which rather helped Joe, and almost enabled him to
score a great triumph. Everybody knows that between the temper of Mr.
Gladstone and that of his friends and supporters there is an impassable
gulf. That mastery of a vulnerable temper, which accounted for many of
the troubles of his earlier political career, which he himself has
acknowledged in many a pathetic passage in his correspondence--that
mastery of the vulnerable temper is now so complete that the Old Man
glides through scenes of insult and passes over what the humblest member
of the House would often find it hard to endure. There is something
indeed strange, wistful, almost uncanny, in the unbreakable gentleness
of that white figure, with the ivory complexion, the scant white hair,
the large white collar and broad white shirt-front--there is something
which becomes almost an obsession to the observer in watching the figure
with its strangely tranquil and gentle expression in the heat and centre
of all this fierce Parliamentary battle.
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