I did not mean it: Gladstone, Homer and a second chance at Providence

“Perverse mankind! Whose wills, created free, charge all their woes on absolute degree;
All to the dooming gods their guilt translate, and are miscall’d the crimes of fate.”
- Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, Book One, spoken by Zeus.
(Or, as Emily Wilson’s recent translation more simply put it, “This is absurd, that mortals blame the gods. They say we cause their suffering, but they themselves increase it by folly.”)

My last piece on William Ewart Gladstone explored the earthly reasons he went to Corfu and changed parties in 1858-59. This time I’m exploring Gladstone’s views of potential celestial reasons that these things happened to him: Providence, fate, destiny, predestination, free will and progress. For just before Gladstone left for Corfu, which I argue in the last essay led to his changing parties, he had written a 1,600-page, three-volume book called Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, in which he analyzed at length his and Homer’s views of those concepts. My operating theory is that Gladstone would have had these ideas bouncing around his mind as he toured what he believed to be the site of Odysseus’ storytelling to the Phaeacians, while contemplating both his own, then-frustrated and isolated fate in the world and the fate of an Ionian people demanding it be reunited with what it saw as its homeland. The questions dove-tailed. He was undergoing a transition, very quietly, from a conservatism about the self-interest of Britain abroad to a new liberalism both about the humanitarian needs of foreign peoples and the conditions of the people at home. He had a role to play in the world but was immersed in a Homeric perspective on both personal and national agency. Given what he had to say about his despair at being “cast out of party connection” he may even have felt out of control of his destiny, which he seized only by accepting a top role in the new Liberal party. Gladstone the conservative believed progress was not inevitable, but Gladstone the liberal, though he never recanted that view, tried to become an instrument of justice in what he called the providential order of the world.

Progress

Of the abstract concepts listed above, a belief in inevitable progress is the most relevant to Gladstone’s politics. In the 19th century liberals tended to believe history inevitably progresses towards better outcomes. Conservatives tended to believe the opposite. In his book The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone, Robert Kelley speculates that Gladstone was converted to a belief in progress as a controlling influence on history when he changed from the Conservative to the Liberal Party. Kelley wrote:

 “[Gladstone] possessed that most distinguishing mark of the Liberal mind, a fundamental optimism about life in its larger aspects. His supreme optimism allowed him to bear the innumerable disappointments that came his way. To him the nineteenth century clearly demonstrated that the processes of history tended inevitably and progressively to free the individual. Like Jefferson he believed in social evolution to some consummation, though in his  case to a pre-eminently Christian one. Even after his defeat on Irish Home Rule in 1886, he disagreed with Alfred Tennyson's bleak ruminations on the modern world, insisting that it had grown gentler, more tender in public conscience, in the years since he had first entered public life.
“Gladstone made the rare journey from vigorous conservatism to vigorous liberalism. The son of a rich Tory entrepreneur, he began his political career as a young man whose seat in the Commons was given to him by a duke. He execrated the Reform Bill of 1832, saying it foretold the collapse of Britain into weakness and anarchy—in sharp contrast to his later optimism. In despair he wrote to a friend: ‘The day of our greatness and stability is no more ... the chill and damp of death are already creeping over England's glory.’  In his first years in Parliament he opposed practically every reform that came before it” (Kelley 149).

But, writing as he was in 1969, Kelley did not have David Bebbington’s 2004 The Mind of Gladstone, which argued that the statesman never recanted his initial rejection of the concept of progress. “I am not a man very sanguine about what is called political progress;” Gladstone said in 1877 in Dublin, “that is to say, I labour for it, I thankfully accept its results. But I am convinced that we are very far indeed from the day when the actual state of political and social circumstances will so much approximate to anything like our ideal standard” (Bebbington 268).

Gladstone rejected the notion of inevitable progress in his study on Homer. His book was motivated in large part by his distaste for the views of another Homeric scholar whom he knew personally as a fellow member of Parliament. George Grote, an English political radical and the author of an extensive history of Greece,  believed in the forward march of progress. In his 12-volume History of Greece, published between 1846 and 1856, Grote celebrated golden age of philosophers in the fifth century BC and viewed Homer’s much earlier time as a dark age.  “Grote insisted that there were no ethics taught in Homer and that in Homeric society … there are ‘scarcely any other moralizing forces in operation,’” Bebbington wrote in an essay titled "Gladstone and Grote" in a book of essays edited by Peter Jagger. "As the veneration of the gods lost its hold ... moral standards steadily developed down to the time of Socrates. Homer's age had been marked, according to Grote by homicide, fraud, brutality, robbery, perjury, neglect of orphans, mutilation and vengeance” (Jagger 172). Thus, Grote believed, Homer's era was a dark time from which Socrates' later era progressed.

This perspective, that Homer's religious era was less moral than Socrates' less religious time, was anathema to Gladstone. His view ran the opposite direction: Morality was pure in Adam’s time, and the rest was subject to the Fall. "The closer to the dawn of human history, the purer the religion and morality must be,” Bebbington writes of Gladstone's view. Gladstone rebutted Grote in Studies of Homer: “I ask permission to protest against whatever savours of the idea that any Socrates whatever was the patentee of the sentiment of right and wrong, which is the most precious part of the patrimony of mankind. The movement of Greek morality with the lapse of time was chiefly downward, and not upward.” (Gladstone 420). 

Gladstone specified the treatment of women in Homer as an example of the fallaciousness of this idea of the march of progress. He felt women were treated well in Homer's time, a strange conclusion when one focuses for example on the routine enslavement and rape of female prisoners during the Trojan Wars as depicted in The Iliad. But Gladstone focused instead on the fact that in The Odyssey the Phaeacian Nausica was allowed to choose her own husband. This proved morals had not improved since Homer's time. Gladstone wrote:

“No view of a peculiar civilization can on its ethical side be satisfactory, unless it include a distinct consideration of the place held in it by woman. And, besides, the position of the Greek woman of the heroic age is in itself so remarkable, as even on special grounds to require separate and detailed notice. It is likewise so elevated, both absolutely and in comparison with what it became in the historic ages of Greece and Rome amidst their elaborate civilization, as to form in itself a sufficient confutation of the theories of those writers who can see in the history of mankind only the development of a law of continual progress from intellectual darkness into light, and from moral degradation up to virtue” (Gladstone 479).

After joining the Liberal Party, however, Gladstone became more likely to speak in terms of progress. He talked of progress as stemming from the Advent of Christ and eventually said that he saw progress occurring in the education and virtue of the working class and therefore shifted his opinion of their suitability to the vote. Still, he maintained his conservative position that there had been a downward slide in morality since Homer's age even in his last book on the poet in 1890, just eight years before his death.

Predestination

Relevant to whether Gladstone sees in history a move towards progress is whether he sees history as serving a design. Thus, his view of predestination, fate, destiny and Providence are material. Gladstone omits predestination from his examination of Homer, but he did write about it in his early conservative days in the 1830s. He said God’s election may be influenced by the way he knows humans will react to his grace. Bebbington heralds this as a “major step toward" the doctrine of free will. More relevant to his Homeric studies, however, is the concept of Providence, or the view that God provides guidance over human events (Bebbington 52).

Providence

Gladstone spoke regularly of God’s Providence in speeches and conversation. He apparently felt Providence moved slowly, as England had in its long move toward democracy, which wouldn’t be completed until 20 years after Gladstone’s death in 1898. In any case he applied that logic to Italy’s fight for unification in 1859:  

“It may be in the designs of Providence that [Italy] shall one day be territorially great, but if she is to attain to that kind of greatness and to join with it any durability of power, it must be by the slow growth of the oak, by the prolonged exercise of self-command and self-denial, by the careful development of her industry and her internal resources, by disinterested service to her sister States in Italy, and above all by the strictest respect for every political and legal right.” (Beales 29).

Gladstone refers to providence in two senses in Studies on Homer. First, he asserts that Greece and the Homeric poems have a special place in what he calls “the Providential order of the world.” H.C.G. Matthew points out that this theory was controversial when Gladstone published it. “Gladstone's belief that Homer represented almost a parallel revelation to that of the Old Testament (though lacking the latter's 'one invaluable code of Truth and Hope') was, to many Victorians, a shocking, startling, and almost blasphemous claim, Matthew writes. “Greece … had in Gladstone's view a special place in the 'providential order of the world', and it was the duty of those involved in the construction of a modern society to study and expand its lessons” (Matthew 159).
 
The second sense in which Gladstone discusses Providence is the application of the concept within the Homeric poems themselves. Gladstone found four different Greek words in Homer that he believed to describe “the idea of Divine Providence.” Each of these words reflects the agency of the Gods over human events. Gladstone says Homer also uses references to Zeus when he intends to imply providence. Providence is almost always associated with Zeus, though sometimes with Apollo and Athena, Gladstone adds. (He uses the Roman names, Jupiter for Zeus, Minerva for Athena.) And, significantly, he says that providence in Homer’s poems sides with justice. At one point in Studies on Homer, Gladstone contemplates “The Providential Government of the World and the administration of retributive justice.” As Hugh Lloyd-Jones puts it in his book Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Gladstone finds that in The lliad as in The Odyssey the justice of the gods is upheld at every stage and that in the end 'the authority of the providential order is reestablished’” (Lloyd-Jones 121).

Destiny and fate

While Gladstone implies that in Homer providence bends toward justice, destiny is a whole different matter. Destiny and fate, which are used more or less interchangeably in Gladstone's writings on Homer, represent the idea that what happens in life--particularly death--is predetermined. Gladstone found another five “forms of speech” that are “deployed by Homer to express the idea of Destiny.” The words that refer to Destiny convey concepts like one’s “portion,” or “share,” and do not convey a deliberation by the gods. Sometimes in Greek and Roman mythology fate is personified, as in the  Moirai, the Fates, who weave destiny. The Moirai came after Homer, but the nearly identical figures of "the Spinners" do appear briefly in The Odyssey:

 “They made the offerings and drank as much as they desired, and then Alcinous said,
‘Listen, lords. Hear what my heart commands.
The feast is over; go home, go to bed.
At dawn, we will call more of our best men, and host the stranger in our halls, and offer fine sacrifices to the gods, then plan how we may help his journey, so our guest may travel quickly, without pain or trouble, encountering no trouble on the way, however far away it is, until
he reaches home. Once there, he must endure whatever was spun out when he was born by Fate and by the heavy ones, the Spinners.’”
- The Odyssey Book Seven (Wilson 214).

Homer is perhaps not entirely consistent in his representation of fate. In one moment in The Iliad, Zeus determines the death of Hector with a set of weights on golden scales:

“Zeus, the father, held his golden scales up high and in them set two deadly weights,
two dooms of death that stretches suffering--one for Achilles, one for horse-lord Hector.
The god raised up the middle of the scales, and down the destined day of Hector sank and went to Hades.”
- Homer, The Iliad Book 22 (Wilson 533).

In most instances, however, the deaths of characters are determined not by Zeus or the other gods, but by fate or destiny itself. This brings up an ancient subject of discussion in Homeric scholarship: Are the Gods limited by fate, or not? Books and papers are still being written today on the subject. For his part, Gladstone makes a somewhat controversial statement when he asserts that “We thus see that, on the whole, the force of destiny, as it appears in Homer, although it commonly prevails, is not uniformly irresistible” and then in the very next sentence says “We never find the deities actually fighting against it, or against them.”

The fact is we very often do see the Gods fighting the edicts of destiny in Homer. For example, Poseidon knows destiny is said to call for Odysseus to make it home, but he nonetheless throws every storm he’s got in Homer’s way as he attempts perilously to make it to Ithaca by raft. I’ll be quoting more in the next few paragraphs from Homer than Gladstone generally does. His impenetrable prose could have used a few more Homeric block quotes. It is not for no reason that Gladstone told a friend Volume 3 of that work, which covers politics, was the “least unreadable” (Jenkins 183). This essay quotes only from Volume 2, which covers religion. In the following passage the white goddess Ino makes clear Poseidon is fighting what "fate" intends for Odysseus:

"Poor man! Why does enraged Poseidon
create an odyssey of pain for you?
But his hostility will not destroy you.
… Fate decrees that there you will survive.”
- Ino the white goddess in Book Five of The Odyssey (Wilson 191).

Similarly, Zeus considers saving both his own son Sarpedon and the Trojan Hector, before being talked out of it. In fact, the implication is made by Hera in Book 16 of The Iliad that not only does Zeus have the power to overrule Destiny, so do the other gods. But they never do: 

"What a disaster this will be for me! [said Zeus.]
The man I love the most of all mankind, my son Sarpedon, is assigned to die, killed by Patroclus. I am of two minds, wondering if I ought to lift him up alive and take him from the battlefield, the source of tears, and carry him away, and set him in the fertile land of Lycia--or kill him now beneath Patroclus' hands."
Hera, the ox-eyed goddess, answered, "What?
What have you said, disastrous child of Cronus?
You want to free from painful death a mortal whose lot was dealt out long ago? Then do it!
But none of us Olympians supports you.
Now let me tell you this. Take it to heart.
If you convey Sarpedon to his home
alive, watch out! Some other gods may also decide to take their offspring from the battle.
Around the mighty town of Priam fight numerous sons of other deathless gods, who may do likewise—-and incur your rage."
- The Iliad, Book 16 (Wilson 395).

In fact, when Athena challenges Zeus on his briefly posited idea of saving Hector from fate’s fatal decree, Zeus even responds (in essence) “aw, I didn’t mean it:”

"Look at this dreadful scene!
I see a man I love chased round the wall.
I pity Hector in my heart. He burned numerous cattle thighs as offerings to me upon the peaks and glens of Ida, and also in the citadel of Troy.
Now glorious Achilles chases him on quick feet all around the town of Priam.
So come now, gods, consider and decide whether to save this man from death, or crush him, a fine man though he is, beneath the hands of great Achilles, son of Peleus."
Athena, gray-eyed goddess, answered him,
"God of the brilliant lightning and dark clouds, father, what have you said? This man is mortal!
He has long since been doomed by fate to die.
And yet you want to set him free from death, whose name is pain? Then go ahead and do it!
But none of us will praise what you have done."
Then Zeus who gathers clouds together answered,
"Dear daughter, child of Triton, do not worry.
I did not mean it when I said those things.”
- The Iliad, Book 22 (Wilson 531-532).

Gladstone was contemplating these matters in 1858-59, just as he was playing God himself in Corfu, where he was scandalized to discover there were few copies of Homer available for the natives (Magnus 136). The people of Corfu and the other Ionian Islands were clamoring to be made part of Greece, not stay the British colonies they had been since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. It fell to Gladstone to recommend to the Queen whether to grant the people’s request or stay in the unpopular godlike position of ruling them without their consent. When he turned in his recommendations to the Queen, he recommended a continued presence there for the crown, advising her to go easy on those who continued to advocate for union with Greece but sticking to a conservative version of British self-interest that he would not hold to in the end. Five years later in 1864, though, he voted to let Corfu and the other Ionian Islands join Greece. (His side won.) Did he, like Zeus, mutter “I did not mean it when I said those things”?

When Gladstone took a stance in favor of the colonization of the Ionian Islands, he was standing for the existing order, for Greece’s “portion” as it seemed to be doled out by destiny. When he later voted for the Ionian Islands to be returned to Greece, he bucked that destiny and became the change he wished to see. He became the instrument of that Providential Order in which he once said Greece had a special place.

Select Bibliography

Beales, Derek. England and Italy 1859-60. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961.

Bebbington, David. The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Gladstone, William E. Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Volume 2. Oxford University Press. 1859.

Hawkins, Agnus. Parliament, Party and the Art of Politics in Britain, 1855-59. Stanford University Press, 1987.

Homer; Pope, Alexander, translator. The Odyssey. Project Gutenberg, 2002.

Homer; Wilson, Emily, translator. The Iliad. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Homer; Wilson, Emily, translator. The Odyssey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Jagger, Peter J., ed. Gladstone. London: Hambledon Press, 1998.

Jenkins, Roy. Gladstone. London: Macmillan, 1995.

Kelley, Robert. The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Magnus, Philip. Gladstone: A Biography. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1954.

Matthew, H.C.G. Gladstone 1809-1898. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Morley, John. The Life of Gladstone, Volume 1. Project Gutenberg, 2007.

Turner, Frank M. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. Yale University Press, 1981.