No More Learning

POLITICAL ORATORS AND WRITERS OF PAMPHLETS
The great age of English political oratory might seem to have
passed away with the fatal year (1806) which removed both Pitt
and Fox from the scene of their mighty conflicts; a greater orator
than either-Burke—had died nearly a decade earlier. When, in
1802, James Mill arrived in London, he at first thought the
eloquence of the house of commons inferior to that of the
general assembly (though nearly a generation was to elapse before
the chair of that assembly was filled by Chalmers, the most brilliant
of all luminaries of the Scottish pulpit). But Mill listened with


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I 20
[CH.
Political Orators
admiration to Fox and Sheridan, as well as to some other well-
known parliamentary speakers of the time.
One of these was William Wilberforce, then in the midst of his
immortal efforts for the abolition of the slave trade, accomplished
in 1807. The all but unique position which, after this, he held in
public estimation was by no means due only to his self-devotion
to a cause appealing to the deepest instincts of humanity, and to
his detachment from all party motives of action, in 'any under-
taking which had the welfare of mankind for its object? ' It, also,
owed much to the charm of his personality, the modest dignity of
his bearing and the unaffected ease and simple grace of his delivery.
Among other parliamentary figures prominent in the early years
of the century was William Windham, whose birth and breeding as
a country gentleman of ancient descent had implanted in him,
together with an unextinguishable interest in the peasantry, a
spirit of unflinching patriotism and of independence which refused
to bend before any pressure of court or party. A school-fellow of
Fox, and a follower of Burke, he had imbibed a love of literature
which induced Johnson to describe him as, in that region, inter
stellas Luna minores. His oratory, however, found its proper
sphere in the house of commons, and it was when he led the
Grenville party in opposition that his ability as a debater was
most conspicuous. His speeches, of which a considerable col-
lection remains, are full of apt, rather than striking, Latin quo-
tations, besides occasional native sallies. In a different key from
his attacks upon the peace of Amiens, and his stern comments on
the seizure of the Danish fleet, is his long and temperate speech
on the scandal which drove the duke of York from office. No
politician was ever more free from self-interest, or orator from rant.
‘Nothing,' he said, 'is more agreeable than to praise the Athenians
among the Athenians; but I rather consider it the duty of public
men to speak wholesome truths. '
Samuel Whitbread had been educated with the same care as
Windham and, by his marriage with the sister of his school-
fellow, afterwards earl Grey, was brought near to the innermost
whig circle, though his wealth was derived from the great
trading concern in which he was a partner. Long a devoted
follower of Fox, he was fearless in the denunciation of all kinds of
abuses; during the last six years of his life, he is said to have
been the most frequent speaker in the house of commons, and
i See the admirable essay on Wilberforce in Sir James Stephen's Essays in
Ecclesiastical Biography.


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II]
Erskine. Tierney
I 2 I
was the soul of the agitation in favour of the princess of Wales. His
vehemence of manner was a constant source of derision to satirists
with pen or picture, who always remembered the brewery; but,
though his impetuosity reflected his enthusiasm for what he held
right, he could, as both Sheridan and Burdett found, be prudent
on occasion.
Thomas, afterwards lord, Erskine seems never to have quite
caught the tone of the house of commons, though a consistent
member of the whig party, whose principles he, also, upheld with
his pen? But his fame rests on his forensic oratory, which entitled
him to choose for the motto of his peerage the words 'trial by
jury. He was engaged in a series of cases bearing on the liberty
of the press and the charge of constructive treason; and defended
in turn lord George Gordon, Thomas Paine, the publisher Stock-
dale, who had incurred the wrath of the house of commons, and
the radical founder of the London Corresponding society, Thomas
Hardy, whom he brought off amidst the wildest popular enthusiasm.
That his triumphs, described by earl Russell as those of the
sword and buckler' which 'protected justice and freedom,' were
free from meretricious glitter seems to be borne out by those of
his speeches that have been preserved out of an enormous mass
of oratory, if allowance be made for the egoism which seems
inseparable from the Ciceronian manner and which was certainly
not alien to Erskine's nature.
George Tierney, on the other hand, was a parliamentary poli-
tician proper, whose course of public action was determined by
personal interest as well as by political opinions. Though of Irish
descent, he was educated at Eton and Cambridge (Peterhouse);
and though, from 1797 onwards, a declared opponent of Pitt (with
whom he fought a blank duel in the following year), he was not a
favourite of Fox, and, indeed, for a time, carried on the struggle
against Pitt on his own account, as nobody's friend, unless it was
as the friend of humanity. His later career was equally varied,
though he attained to a leading, rather than a commanding,
position. His ability as a debater made him a most formidable,
as he was a most vigilant and tenacious, adversary and he may be
regarded as the last of the great parliamentarians of the revo-
lutionary period. His speeches seem to have been often colloquial
in manner, but never deficient in point, and to have excelled in
the art of restating an adversary's case so as to turn it inside out.
Unlike lord Castlereagh, the extraordinary faultiness of whose
1 See his Defence of the Whigs in vol. xv of The Pamphleteer (1820).


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I 22
[CH.
Political Orators
style, in both speech and writing, seems to reflect shortcomings
which have been allowed to weigh too heavily against such merits
as should be conceded to his foreign policy, George Canning,
whose star shone forth in full splendour as that of Castlereagh
sank below the horizon, had long been famed for the force of his
political oratory as well as for the irresistible wit of his political
writing. He gained a place among the foremost orators of the
day by his great speech in December 1798 against the resumption
of negotiations with France; among the tributes paid to the mighty
spirit of Pitt after his death in 1806, Canning's soared into the
loftiest sphere of eulogy. In 1808, he vindicated the seizure of
the Danish fleet-for which, as foreign secretary, he was primarily
responsible—in a speech of extraordinary power. But his great
popularity began with his addresses to the constituency of
Liverpool; and it was, in the first instance, the fire of his oratory
which prepared the triumph of his statesmanship. After he
had begun to rise to the height of his parliamentary position,
and had delivered the great speech (28 April 1825) upholding the
principle of pacific non-intervention in the case of Spain, he
returned to the subject in a memorable address at Plymouth
which strikes a note of far-sighted grandeur such as no other
political orator has reached in England since the days of Burke.
When the recognition of the Spanish American colonies was an
accomplished fact, Canning, in the famous defence of his policy,
12 December 1826, spoke of himself as having called in the new
world to redress the balance of the old. When he became prime
minister of Great Britain, without even then commanding the
firm support of either king or parliament, his strength still lay
in the popularity which, in a free community-be it Athens or
England-always sustains the statesman who has mounted to the
foremost place among its leaders; and this Periclean supremacy
was the direct offspring of his oratory as well as of his states-
manship. The duke of Wellington—at least a candid critic-
pronounced Canning the finest speaker he had ever heard; and
this admiration extended to his state papers. Although, in his
published speeches, it is not often, except in the greatest of them,
that we can catch a notion of his completeness in matter united
1 A characteristic example of Canning at his best will be found in the long speech
On unlawful Societies in Ireland' in vol. v of the 6 vol. edition of his Speeches (1828).
The grand personal note (in regard to himself as part cause of the Peninsular war) is
not wanting here, nor are humorous quotations, ranging from Dr Johnson to Mrs
Malaprop.


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11] Canning. Brougham 123
to perfection in manner-of the 'rich, gay, aspiring eloquence'
ascribed to him by lord Morley—there is a family likeness in
them all. Imaginative power and wit, often inimitably apt, are
sustained by a scholarship which abhors an unpolished corner in
the structure; and, through all, there is visible a large-mindedness
beyond the common range of public oratory, and a large-heartedness
inviting that kind of popularity which Canning was not ashamed
to allow he loved. Of vagueness or of violence, there is nothing
in his speeches; and, when defending himself against misrepre-
sentation, he could grandly say: 'If you have not heard me in
vain, it is well; if you have, I have troubled you too long, but
it has been for the last time. '
The other great orator of Canning's later years, and beyond,
was Henry lord Brougham, whose oratorical powers, exercised, in
one way or another, during a period of some years, are, together
with his other gifts, to be described only by the word prodigious.
His resources were infinite, and the aptness of his use of them
unrivalled; but his forte—we should rather say his fortissimo
-must have lain in conversation, in which his exuberance of life
and spirit were altogether incomparable. His speeches, on the
other hand, as Greville, whose pages sparkle with Broughamiana,
happily puts it, were too long by reason of the perpetual bubbling-up
of new ideas. And there was (can it be denied ? ) something else
which interfered with his full success as an orator, as, of course
in a profounder sense, it did with the completeness of his political
career. He was, in public life, trusted by neither friend nor foe;
and, with all his brilliancy and all his force, he conveyed an
undefinable impression that he had no strong opinions on any
subject that he took up for attack or defence. Yet, when all
deductions have been made, the power and the versatility of his
oratory, due, in no small measure, to the care which he bestowed
upon his efforts, remain one of the wonders in the history of genius.
The scornful fire of his invective burnt itself into the hearts and
souls of its victims, and he was not less himself in long and
elaborate discourses, on subjects outside the ordinary range of
political controversy. His eloquence associated itself with his
labours as a law reformer, with his services to education and the
advance of science and with a vast miscellaneous literary produc-
tivity; but its fame outstripped that of all his other achievements,
and will make him remembered when much that he did and all
that he wrote will have fallen into oblivion.
One of the few speakers, whether on legal or on other themes,


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Political Orators
whom Brougham was unable to crush was John Singleton Copley,
lord Lyndhurst, who, according to Greville, was master of the one
thing, which, in the end, the house of lords preferred to every-
thing else, and which Brougham could never compass-conciseness.
Lyndhurst, whose career and views present certain points of
resemblance to those of his friend Disraeli, made his way to
eminence by an unusual union of qualifications, which included an
oratory of rare polish and point. It showed itself to particular
advantage in those annual reviews which adorned the close, and
pointed the failure, of many a parliamentary session, and which,
though Melbourne called them Lyndhurst's exercitationes, were
certainly not academical in the sense of innocuousness. On the
udicial bench, he had excelled in summing up; and a famous
judgment of his', though afterwards reversed on an appeal which
he resisted in a second address of extraordinary ability, is
described, by one who was no kindly chronicler (lord Campbell),
as 'by all accounts the most wonderful ever heard in Westminster
Hall. '
Among later luminaries of the bar and bench who played a
prominent part in English political life, it is impossible to pass by
Sir Richard Bethell, afterwards lord Westbury, who combined with
extraordinary acumen and lucidity of statement a gift of sarcastic
innuendo which voice and manner rendered absolutely intolerable.
Sir Roundell Palmer, afterwards first earl of Selborne, a refined
scholar and devout churchman, who, as an equity pleader, was
inferior neither to Westbury nor to Hugh M Calmont, afterwards
first earl, Cairns, became one of the greatest judicature reformers
of the age. Like Selborne, Cairns, though of an austere nature,
was a most effective speaker in parliament (as in his defence of
Ellenborough) and might have led his party had he chosen. Sir
Alexander, afterwards lord, Cockburn, in the greatest crisis of lord
Palmerston's career, proved his most valuable ally, and rendered
other political services at the close of a brilliant legal career.
In the great reform movement, with whose triumph a new era
in English political life began, the foremost figure is that of Charles
second earl Grey, to whose courage and sincerity the chief credit of
the passing of the bill is, above all, due. Since, in 1786, he had
(though matters of finance were never much to his taste) in an
admired maiden speech attacked Pitt's commercial treaties, he
never faltered, either in the days of the eclipse of the whig party,
or in those of catholic emancipation (in which he delivered a speech
1 In the case of Small v. Attwood.


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11] Orators of the Reform Bill Period 125
which Stanley (Derby) said he would rather have made than
four of Brougham's) and of reform. It was thought regrettable
that lord Grey allowed the fiery nature of John George Lambton,
first earl of Durham, to domineer over him; but this was, chiefly, a
matter of temper. Durham's own career was brief and stormy? ;
the celebrated report on Canadian affairs by which he is most
generally remembered is said to have been mainly written by
his secretary Charles Buller, a young liberal of great personal
popularity, a lively orator and an acute reasoner in both speech
and pamphlet.
In the debates on the Reform bill, Macaulay's renown as an
orator was first established; although, perhaps, he never quite
fulfilled the exorbitant expectations formed of him at the time
of his first entrance into the parliamentary arena. It was but
natural that what was most admirable in his speeches should
be their literary qualities; they were usually of the nature of
harangues or set orations, carrying away in their rush the argu-
ments of his adversaries. But they were not designed as replies
and, thus, lack some of the most stimulating qualities of parlia-
mentary oratory. Among his later speeches, those on the question
of copyright, to which he could contribute a most extraordinary
wealth of illustration, are notable as having not only influenced
but actually determined legislation.
Outside parliament, the Reform bill campaign was carried on
in innumerable speeches, among which those of Henry ('Orator')
Hunt should, perhaps, not be passed by. When, after the great
bill had passed, he entered parliament, he soon sank into a non-
entity, and was said by Cobbett to be really as inoffensive as
Pistol or Bardolph. ' Hunt and Cobbett died in the same year
(1835); but no comparison is possible between their powers.
To oratorical distinction, neither John Charles, viscount Althorp
(afterwards earl Spencer), lord Grey's lieutenant in the house of
commons, where he enjoyed a unique personal regard, nor his
successor in the leadership of the whig party and as prime-minister,
William Lamb, viscount Melbourne, had any wish to attain. The
latter, indeed, though he went so far as to declare that 'the worst
thing about the Spaniards was their speaking so well,' could him-
self do this as most other things well when obliged to do them.
The two statesmen, in turn colleagues and rivals, who succeeded
lord Melbourne as heads of the liberal party, lord John, afterwards
1 His advanced radicalism is reflected in his speech of 1822, explaining his own
reform project, printed in The Pamphleteer, 'no. XLI, vol. XXI.


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I 26
[ch.
Political Orators
earl, Russell and Henry Temple, viscount Palmerston, were, neither
of them, born to sway senates by the force or grace of their
eloquence. But the extraordinary self-confidence inbred in the
former and his early services to the cause of parliamentary
reform, helped him over the repeated breakdowns, at times self-
provoked, of his career, and occasionally seemed to warm up
the outward coldness of a courageous and patriotic nature. Lord
Palmerston, whose easy disposition, great capacity for affairs and
quick perception of the mainsprings of personal popularity esta-
blished him in the end as a national favourite, made at least one
great speech in his life (the Civis Romanus speech of 1850),
besides many other successful, and some unsuccessful, efforts; he
neither shrank from claptrap, nor always avoided flippancy, but
the ring which found an echo in English hearts was not wanting
where there was a need for it. In Palmerston's early days, Byron
had called his oratory unconvincing; but he had learnt something
from Canning, besides the traditions of his foreign policy.
It is not as an Irishman that it is usual to remember Palmerston;
but not a few orators of Irish birth were the descendants of an
age when the art of oratory had been fostered by the spirit of
parliamentary independence, or themselves lived at a time
when the Irish bar, as the one high-road to a career of public
distinction, encouraged an eloquence directly appealing, in manner
as well as in matter, to broad popular sympathies. Among the
successors of Grattan, William Conyngham, afterwards lord,
Plunket-to whom, in spite of O'Connell and the anti-vetoists,
the conduct of the catholic relief movement was, in the first
instance, entrusted—was probably, the most finished speaker. His
career at the Irish bar reaches back some years into the eighteenth
century, and he did not resign the Irish lord chancellorship (in
which he had exhibited very high judicial qualities) till 1841.
One of the finest of his speeches was that of 21 February 1829,
on the catholic claims, which, while demonstrating that the ex-
clusion of catholics from the legislature was a constitutional
innovation, upheld the Irish church establishment as, historically,
part of the constitution. This and other speeches by him which
.
remain are, certainly, on a very high level of both argument and
style. The gravity of his eloquence frequently rose to imaginative
loftiness; and, in the opinion of a cultivated critic', he would, had
he been bred in parliament, have been the greatest speaker that
1 The first earl of Dudley. See The Life, Letters and Speeches of Lord Plunket, by
Plunket, D. , with an introductory preface by lord Brougham (2 vols. 1867), p. 67.
a


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II]
Plunket,
O'Connell. Sheil
127
ever appeared in it. Lord Brougham compares his twofold
eminence, at the bar and in parliament, to that of Berryer,
perhaps the most exquisite speaker to whom it has been the lot
of anyone now living to listen. But, from the point of view
of popular effect-effect exercised not upon this or that assembly
only, but upon the nation as a whole, the name of every other
Irish orator—perhaps that of any orator of whatever people
or age-pales before that of Daniel O'Connell. There is
little if any exaggeration in this statement, albeit exaggeration
was his element. He told Jeremy Bentham that, in his opinion,
it was right to speak of one's friends in the strongest language
consistent with truth'; and, as to his adversaries, from Wellington
and Peel downwards-apart from the magnificent scurrilities
which he hurled at such offenders as lord Alvanley and Disraeli-
the vituperative habit had, as we read, grown upon him in ordinary
talk till such words as 'rogue,'' villain,' scoundrel,' had, in the end,
lost all precise significance for him. But, as an orator, he had his
vocabulary as he had the whole of his armoury of action under
control; nor was there ever a demagogue so little led away either
by his tongue or by the passion within him. Rude, when it suited
him to be rude, and coarse, when coarseness was expected from
him, he was irresistible as an orator; first, because he never lost
sight of his purpose, and, secondly, because he was never out of
sympathy with the whole of his audience-indeed, speaker and
audience were one. That he should have remained true both to
the aspirations of the Irish people and to his principle of ex-
cluding illegal means or violence from the action which he urged,
was, perhaps, the greatest triumph of his oratory. It was forensic
in both origin and features; but the orator, like the man-his wit,
his ardour, his impudence, his piety-were racy of the soil to
which he belonged by blood and indissoluble congeniality, and,
though he held his own against the foremost debaters of the house
of commons, he was at his best, from first to last, in his native
surroundings, in law courts or city hall, or facing the multitudes
at Limerick or on Tara hill.
The third name in the triad of great Irish orators who strove,
though not always in concord, for the welfare of their country
was that of Richard Lalor Sheil. Educated under old-fashioned
legitimist and, Jesuit influences, he had literary gifts, which, in his
younger days, made a name for him in poetic drama. But the
life's work of this ‘iambic rhapsodist,' as O'Connell—not felicitously
-called him, was, both at the bar (where his most brilliant, and


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128
[CH.
Political Orators
surely longest, speech was in defence of the ‘liberator's 'son, 1844)
and in the house of commons, devoted to the cause of Ireland,
and to that of catholic emancipation in particular. His parlia-
mentary position was never either an uncompromising or a
commanding one, though his fire and fluency alike called forth
admiration and made Gladstone, in his youthful days, avow himself
unwilling to follow him in debate. Nor is it easy even now to
resist the effect of such a speech as that in which in October
1828) he advocated the catholic claim before a Kentish audience
on Pennenden heath and taunted England with being, in the
matter of religious tolerance, 'behind almost every nation in
Europe. ' He shone both in exordium and in peroration; but his
taste was less pure than Plunket's, and his invective less torrential
than O'Connell's.
We pass abruptly to the other side of politics, though the first
name to be mentioned is still that of an Irishman. But the duke
of Wellington made no pretence of figuring among the orators of
his age. Insensible as he was to popular applause, he sometimes
spoke well without knowing it, and, also, at times (as in the great
reform debate of 1831), spoke very badly. His oratory, in every
sense of the word, was unstudied, and, on constitutional ques-
tions, quite out of its element. His despatches would suffice to
show that he was not without style; but he reserved it for matter
of which he was master.
With the great name of Wellington is inseparably associated
that of Sir Robert Peel, whose political life more distinctly, perhaps,
than that of any English statesman since Walpole, centred in the
house of commons. Outside that assembly, a certain stiffness,
born of reserve rather than of haughtiness, may, at times, have stood
in his way; and he could be set down as 'a cold feeler and a
cautious stepper. ' But the house of commons he knew, and came
to sway for a long time with an undisputed pre-eminence; and the
list is long of his speeches which mark momentous advances in
our political history and attest his extraordinary personal as-
cendancy. His maiden speech, delivered in 1810 at the age of
twenty-two, was thought to have been the best since the younger
Pitt's; and, nine years afterwards (when the question was under
discussion whether Canning or he was fittest for the leader-
ship of the house), Canning described the speech in which Peel
6
1 His eldest brother, Richard marquis of Wellesley, a brilliant classical scholar
and a lover of literature (Italian in especial), was also a highly accomplished orator,
though he spoke but little in parliament.


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11]
Peel. Derby
129
introduced the resolutions providing for the resumption of cash
payments, on which 'Peel's act' was founded, as the greatest
wonder he had ever witnessed. Ten years later, in March 1829,
Peel delivered one of the greatest, and, at the same time, one of
the most characteristic, speeches of his entire career—that on
catholic emancipation, ending with a noble peroration fitly
described as eloquent with the spirit of duty. Yet, the most
memorable part of his career as a parliamentary statesman and
orator only set in with his definitive return to office in 1841. In
the following year, he made his first great budget speech-a
complete course of political economy'—and to this period, too,
belongs his speech (1843) on the Factory acts and the existing
distress, which, to baron Brunnow, seemed 'eloquence as the
ancients understood the word. ' After his historic resignation,
he made one further great speech-on 28 June 1850, the day
before that of his fatal accident-against the vote of confidence
in Palmerston's foreign policy. Bright commemorated it as Peel's
"last, most beautiful and most solemn' utterance; and it was as
worthy of him in its moderation as it was in its truthfulness.
Peel's greatest quality—his moral courage, to which he owed the
self-confidence that made him, in his own words, 'pique himself
on having never failed in carrying anything proposed by him’-
is reflected in his oratory. It is neither impassioned nor richly
ornamented (though he was a good scholar); but it never falls
short of its purpose and can rise with the greatness of the issues
which it is directly designed to bring about.
During the long period of waiting which followed after Peel
had broken up the party, the conservatives were under the
leadership of Stanley, with lord George Bentinck (who died in 1848)
and Disraeli as his lieutenants in the house of commons. Edward
Stanley-lord Stanley from 1834, and (fourteenth) earl of Derby
from 1851–had, after distinguishing himself at Oxford, begun his
political life as a whig, and, in the Reform bill debates, opposed
Peel, and put down Croker in a most successful speech (1831);
but he separated from that party in 1833, and became a supporter
of Peel, whose Irish policy he championed with great spirit against
O'Connell. He twice filled the office of prime-minister, but was in
opposition during most of his later political life. Though far from
reckless in the guidance of the counsels of his party, as a speaker,
the 'Rupert of debate,' as Bulwer Lytton called him in The New
Timon, was, beyond doubt, one of the most splendid, as he was
one of the most impetuous, foemen in the field. His oratory was,
E. L. XIV.
CH. II.
9


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130
[CH.
Political Orators
however, under the control of a well-trained taste', and free from
the artifices of rhetoric. While his vivacity caused him, at sixty,
to be thought one of the cleverest young men in parliament, he
was occasionally accused of a levity of tone recalling other contests
than those of the political arena. The earl of Derby's colleague, the
earl of Ellenborough, remained one of the foremost orators of the
house of lords, even after he had resigned the presidency of the
board of control in 1858. He was a man of brilliant gifts ; but his
oratory reflects the masterfulness of disposition which he had
most prominently displayed as governor-general of India.
In the revolt against Peel, of which the house of commons
was, necessarily, the chief scene, the leading parts were played
by lord George Bentinck and Disraeli. Lord George had made
a high-minded sacrifice of his interest in the turf, and, during
his short political career, proved a very effective, if not always
highly refined, speaker, who took great trouble with facts and
figures. The parliamentary career of Benjamin Disraeli, first earl
of Beaconsfield, really began with those attacks upon Peel which
left their mark upon the political history of the country. They,
also, left their mark upon his style of oratory, which, after, at
first, deriving its significance from its invective, retained the
original seasoning even when it was applied to the unfolding or
defence of a positive policy. Disraeli's power of sarcasm (which no
orator ever more successfully heightened by scornfulness of manner
and by mimicry of gesture) was, however, only one of the gifts
conspicuous in a long succession of speeches—some delivered,
as it were, at bay, some, in the moment of triumph. None of
these gifts was more assiduously cultivated by their possessor
than the imaginative faculty, with which he was sumptuously
endowed and which, in great matters and in small, though in
imperial, in preference to 'parochial,' questions, he constantly
turned to the fullest account, but always with consummate dis-
crimination and often, as it was said, 'behind a mask. Thus,
the splendour of his ideals, which, in his younger days, had been
largely associated with fantastic conceptions or racial traditions,
became, in the end, one of the most valuable of his political ways
and means, took captive queen and country, and, for a time, made
the world listen to his eloquence as to the messages of an oracle.
Among the politicians to whom the name of Peelites clung
even after their leader had passed away, Sir James Graham,
who, at first, was regarded as their leader and who, at one time,
1 As to his translation of the Iliad, see, ante, vol. XII, p. 334.


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1]
Granville, Devonshire.
.
Cobden
131
seemed likely to rise to a foremost position in the conduct of
affairs, was a fine speaker, though rather inclined to pompousness,
and the best in the house on financial and economical subjects
(William Huskisson, whose knowledge of these had been most
valuable to Peel, was without oratorical power). But, with all
his ability and statesmanlike insight, he could not gain the full
confidence of his contemporaries, perhaps because he seemed to
be without perfect trust in himself. The most brilliant (except
one) of his political associates, Sidney Herbert, afterwards first
lord Herbert of Lea, died before his oratorical and other gifts
had secured to him the highest political honours.
Among ministers whose attention was chiefly, though, in
neither case, exclusively, given to foreign affairs, the earl of
Clarendon and earl Granville were the most conspicuous; they
were alike men of great personal charm and accomplished
speakers, skilled in the art of diplomatic composition and in
the use of forms and turns of courteous speech, an art which has
often been missing in English statesmen who lacked their cosmo-
politan training. To these qualifications, Granville, whose unselfish
services were of the utmost value to his chief, added that of a
popular vein, which won him many friends outside the foreign
offices of Europe, and made him singularly winning as an orator.
During many a long year of party conflict, Gladstone had no more
loyal adjutant than the marquis of Hartington, afterwards duke
of Devonshire, who possessed in a degree never surpassed the
power, invaluable in debate, of bringing home to friends and
opponents the absolute sincerity of his utterances.
Inseparably linked together in political history, and most of
all by the isolation in which the pair found themselves at more
than one stage of their political career, are the great radical
names of Cobden and Bright. From the days when the elder
of them, Richard Cobden, first entered parliament, in order there
to prosecute, with a single-mindedness as complete as that of the
platform, the campaign for cheapening the food of the people,
an absorbing care for the condition of the people, remained, from
first to last, the note of his oratory, and of the remarkable
political writings in which he gave occasional expression to his
principles. In all his deliverances, he is found transparently
sincere, perfectly definite in purpose and as free from ad cap-
tandum devices as any orator who has commanded the applause
of vast popular audiences or has conquered the attention of
a vigilantly antipathetic house of commons. His persuasiveness,
9-2


## p. 132 (#162) ############################################

132
Political Orators
[ch.
which Bright described as irresistible, was based on a ground-
work of facts, and their logic convinced his hearers, as his
imperturbable sureness of himself showed them to have con-
vinced the speaker. Although a self-taught orator as well as
politician, Cobden was not wholly without a literary sense the
notorious reference to the Ilissus was a mere bit of mischief;
but, neither fancy nor humour, nor even the deeper movements
of indignation, entered much into the spirit of his speeches,
which, penetrating to the kernel of the matter, scattered all the
mistakes and false doctrines by which it was enveloped. In the
Corn law meetings, he left it to his indefatigable coadjutor
William Johnson Fox (Browning's far-sighted friend), who was
always intent upon the interests of the working classes, to draw
touching pictures of the social suffering which the leaguers were
seeking to remedy. Even his antagonism to war, to which he
gave thoughtful expression long before he inveighed against the
concrete example of the conflict with Russia, rested, primarily,
on other than humanitarian grounds. He was not an enthusiast
in either love or hate, and could believe in the sincerity of
others-even of Palmerston-as he was absolutely sincere him-
self. John Bright_Cobden's comrade in the earliest and most
unequivocally successful phase of their public lives, and in their
opposition to a national war which reason and conscience made
them deem unjust, but virtually without his steadfast associate's
support in the long campaign for that extension of the franchise
on which modern democracy is based—was, beyond all doubt, one
of the greatest orators of his own or any other age of English life.
The individuality which mirrored itself in his eloquence, and the
ascendancy which it exercised, were those of genius. Although
he insisted on yielding to Fox, who spoke less frequently and with
more elaboration of art, the palm of orator of the anti-Corn-law
league, he displayed, even in this early period of his life, those
qualities which gradually developed into majestic grandeur. In
many respects, the simplest of men, and an adherent of many
of the homely ways of his community, he seemed to tower among
those around him by an unquestioned, half-heroic, dignity of
personality and presence. The arts of flattery were as strange
to his oratory as they were to his daily converse ; and irony aud
sarcasm seemed alien to the pure truthfulness of his nature. He
was well-read—though not, perhaps, in the common sense of the
phrase. His mind was steeped in the Bible; in his loftier flights,
he seemed to be breathing the atmosphere of the Old Testament;


## p. 133 (#163) ############################################

II]
John Bright. Robert Lowe
133
the thoughts and cadences of Milton were ever on his lips;
and he was familiar with a few other great writers capable of
inspiring noble passages of his eloquence. Solemn reproof, lofty
appeal, sympathy with woe and awe of the divine all these are
to be found in his speeches, where they touch the heights and
depths of human feeling. Of himself, unlike many great orators,
he says little; but the whole history of his public life reveals itself
in his speeches on free trade, or peace and reform, on Ireland,
on India and on that great transatlantic republic whose cause
he upheld, by the side of John Stuart Mill, in the critical hour.
His oratory resembled his life in the grandeur of its simplicity-
hardly a gesture to heighten the effect of the magical voice, only
an occasional sally of wit or humour to relieve the earnestness in
which moral force was naturally blended with human-kindness,
and the whole a self-consistent and unfaltering advance, and a
repose on the heights, when they had been reached, of prophetic
faith. Milton, he said, had taught him, when in his youth he was
beginning to think about public affairs, that true eloquence is
'but the serious and hearty love of truth? '; and the precept,
from first to last, shone like a beacon on his path.
A place of his own among the political orators of his day
must be assigned to Robert Lowe, afterwards viscount Sherbrooke,
a liberal in the general tendency of his ideas and texture of his
intellect, but raised to the height of his political influence and
oratorical renown as the protagonist of the struggle against
democratic reform, with Edward Horsman as the second spokesman
of the Cave (1866–7). In Lowe's speeches, as in his conversation
(his writings were few), bis academical training found very distinct
expression, though antithetically mixed with a stinging wit and
with a knowledge of registration and administration taught by
eight years of colonial, followed by a long and varied home,
experience of parliamentary and official life. But the intrinsic
power of his oratory was such as to enable him to fight with un-
paralleled effect the battle on which he had chosen to enter against
what he called the sentimental, the fatalistic and the aggressive
or compulsory democracy, as represented by Mill, Gladstone and
Bright; and his brief autobiography remains to illustrate the
nature of his wit, under which all sentiment withered away.
In this enumeration, we must pass by those whose public life was
mainly occupied with questions, whether of foreign or home policy,
which did not reach their solution in the nineteenth century and
1 Cf. Trevelyan, G. M. , The Life of John Bright (1913), p. 386.


## p. 134 (#164) ############################################

134
[CH.
Political Orators
some of which remain unsolved at the present day? Among
these were, on the conservative side, at least one statesman of com-
manding personality—Robert Cecil, third marquis of Salisbury-
who, without ever quite laying aside the 'fouts' and 'gibes' of less
responsible days, and often, seemingly, careless of the immediate
effect of indiscretions which would have shaken the trust in the
self-control of a lesser man, impressed large audiences as well
as the discerning few with his fitness to guide the vessel of state
through storms or shoals.
The life of Joseph Chamberlain ended only yesterday, but
in the chief campaign which it was pot given to him to carry
to an issue, he had exercised too potent an influence upon the
future of the British empire to make it easy to pass by his name
in silence in the present connection. But the whole of his parlia-
mentary career, shortened as it was by physical failure, falls outside
the limits within which we judge it right to confine this chapter.
On the other hand, the main transactions and interests of two
generations of the national history seem to gather themselves
into the threescore years of the public career of William Ewart
Gladstone, and into the oratory which gives expression to every
stage and aspect of it; though it is only the earlier portion of that
career on which we can here dwell. Brought up, as he said, in
his native Liverpool under the shadow of the name of Canning,
welcomed at the outset of his parliamentary life by Peel, the
most talented member of Aberdeen’s new ministry of all the
talents, wooed by the tories and indispensable to the whigs,
and head of four successive administrations, he ended as the
chosen chief of the democracy which he had helped to call into
life. To very few other great statesmen of any age has it been
given so indissolubly to unite with his name and fame as a states-
man those of the orator who expounded, commended and placed
on record the chief undertakings of his political genius—unless,
indeed, it be thought fit to compare him to the master-spirit who
of old both perfected and controlled the Attic democracy. In
the year before Gladstone's death, he made the remark that, as to
politics, the basis of his mind was laid principally in finance and
in philanthropy-no very strange combination if, by the side
of some of the most brilliant triumphs of his oratory, the series
of budget speeches, be placed his ardent efforts on behalf of the
Of some distinguished divines, lawyers and men of letters whose parliamentary
oratory added to their renown, the names will be found in other chapters, and in the
bibliography.


## p. 135 (#165) ############################################

II] William Ewart Gladstone
135
suffering Christian subjects of the Turk. But the saying cannot
be accepted as adequately indicating either his chief intellectual
interests or all the most vitalising elements of his inexhaustible
eloquence. On the threshold of manhood, the bent of his mind
had been towards the clerical profession; and for some time he
continued to contemplate secular affairs ‘chiefly as a means of
being useful in church affairs. ' When, six years after entering
parliament, he produced his celebrated book entitled The State in
its Relations with the Church (1838), he took his stand on the
principle that the state must have one religion, and that must, of
course, be the religion which it had recognised as the true. From
this view, he gradually passed to the acceptance of freedom of
religious opinion, coupled with the conviction that the preservation
of truth may be left in other hands than ours, and thus fulfilled
Sheil's prophecy that the champion of free trade would become
the advocate of the most unrestricted liberty of thought. But,
even after he had ceased to stand forth as the champion of the
church he loved, religious feeling continued to be the woof that
crossed the warp of his noblest and most stirring eloquence.
Nor, again, is it possible, in considering the characteristics
of bis oratory, to mistake the extraordinary fineness of its texture,
or to refuse to attribute this, in part, to the congenial dialectical
training of a singularly subtle mind. Gladstone was a classical
scholar, whose imagination delighted to feed on Homer', and whom
a stronger intellectual affinity had familiarised with the pearls of
Vergilian diction; while, among modern literatures, he loved the
Italian with a fervency that inspired in him his earliest incursion
into the domain of foreign affairs and his first endeavours on behalf
of oppressed national aspirations. But he could not be called
either a man of letters, or thoroughly trained in the methods of
scholarship. On the other hand, he was, as a logician, trained in
the use of the whole armoury of the schools, and employed it
habitually and without effort. It was a humorous criticism which,
in the days of his still incomplete economic conversion, described
one of his speeches as consisting of arguments for free trade and
of parentheses in favour of protection; but, in his later, as well as
in his earlier, days, he thoroughly understood, and applied with
consummate skill, the defensive side of the science of debate,
including the use of reservation. No doubt he had what may be
described as the excesses of some of his qualities, and there was
1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. II, p. 19 (speech on Affirmation bill).
2 Cf. ante, vol. XII, p. 334.


## p. 136 (#166) ############################################

136
Political Orators
[CH.
point in the advice of his intimate friend Sir Thomas Acland
that, in speaking on the Jewish emancipation question (1847), he
should be as little as possible like Maurice, and more like the
duke of Wellington.
Those who think of Gladstone as an impassioned orator are
apt to overlook the fact that, in the earlier part of his career,
he very rarely gave occasion for being thus described; indeed, his
platform triumphs belong almost exclusively to his later life, and
his ascendancy in the house of commons had not been gained by
carrying it away, but by convincing it—at times, as it were, in
spite of itself. The gifts of voice and personality remained with
him almost to the last—the magic voice of which, after his great
budget speech of 1860, he was admonished to take care not
to destroy the colour, and the personality which disdained all the
small animosities of political conflict. And, with these, he retained
the lucidity of arrangement and exposition which rendered his
most complicated statements of facts and figures not only intel-
ligible but enjoyable—a gift which had been the most notable
quality of his middle period. To these, had, in his latter days,
been added, in fullest measure, the animating influence of indig-
nation and the prophetic note of aspirations for the future. Of few
great political orators of modern times has there been preserved
so luxuriant a store of recorded eloquence.
Gladstone, whose title to be regarded as the foremost political
orator of his century few will be disposed to dispute, was, also,
in this country, at all events, the most effective of political
pamphleteers. Thrice, above all, in the course of his life he inter-
vened in this way in the course of European politics—for his two
Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen (on the state prosecutions of the
Neapolitan government, 1851); his Vatican Decrees in their
Bearing on Civil Allegiance (1874), with its sequel Vaticanism
(1875), and his Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East
(1876), followed by Lessons in Massacre (1877), sensibly affected
the development of some of the most important political problems
of the times. Nor were these the only occasions on which it
seemed to him expedient to address a wider public than could be
reached by the actual accents of his voice or the reports of his
speeches; and, even after the greatest catastrophe of his political
life, the defeat of the Irish Home Rule bill of 1886, and the ratifi-
cation of this result by an adverse general election, he sat down
to compose a double-barrelled pamphlet on the Irish question.


## p. 137 (#167) ############################################

11]
Political Pamphlets
137
Gladstone's pamphlets do not stand alone as memorable expressions
of opinion put forth by noted British politicians in the nineteenth
century. To those dating from the period which may be held to close
with the deaths of Cobbett and Godwin (1835 and 1836), there is no
necessity for returning here? . The following period had its new
themes, in addition to the old, connected with political reform, re-
ligious freedom and economic progress, and with the support of the
expanding struggle for the claims of nationalities. So early as 1836,
Cobden published the earliest pair of a long series of pamphlets, of
which the second, provoked by the ‘indiscretions' of David Urqu-
hart, brought to a head in a pamphlet by that truculent ex-diplo-
matist, ably combated any attempt at armed intervention against
the eastern policy of Russia. Cobden's pamphlets deserve a notable
place in our political literature, and, among the large number of
publications of this kind produced by the French invasion panic of
1852—3, his 1792 and 1853 was a protest of much more than
passing significance. Bright was capable of writing vigorous
public letters; but his pen was not a favourite weapon with
him as it was with Cobden and with W. J. Fox. Bright's chief
adversary in the battle of franchise, Lowe, was born and bred
a pamphleteer. He had taken up arms against the famous tract
which brought to a close the most notable series of religious
pamphlets known to our literature; and, during his sojourn in
Australia, he contributed to the discussion of the land question in
that continent a luminous address which went to the very root of
the problem (1847). But, on his return to England, his political
activity as a pamphleteer soon merged into that of a journalist.
And such (to conclude this brief note) might seem, with excep-
tions which almost prove the rule, to be the inevitable tendency in
this later age of political writing designed to produce an immediate
effect. Journalism has not destroyed the pamphlet; but the greater
part of its activity has for some time seemed to be absorbed by an
organised form of publication which provides both writers and
readers with opportunities that are at once more rapid, more facile
and more commanding. The future only can show whether the
irrepressible desire of individual opinion to find wholly inde-
pendent expression, together with the recurrence of great crises
in which every voice capable of making itself heard finds solace
and encouragement in accomplishing this, will suffice to keep alive
a form associated with many great names in our literature as well
as with many important or interesting epochs of our history.
1 Cf. , ante, vol. XI, chap. II.


## p. 138 (#168) ############################################

CHAPTER III
CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
JOHN RUSKIN AND OTHERS
THE critical and miscellaneous prose of the Victorian age is a
somewhat unmanageable subject, both because of its volume and
because of its variety. Classification is extremely difficult. There
are some writers who must clearly be ranked as literary critics
and others who, for want of a better word, may be said to belong
to the aesthetic school. Others, again, because of that charming
note of personal friendliness for which Lamb is supreme, may be
described as essayists par excellence. But how are we to classify
Borrow; or Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Japan? And is
there any one class which will hold at once the author of Modern
Painters and the author of Munera Pulveris?
The line of which the evolution is clearest is that of literary
critics, and it will be convenient to treat first those who can be
classified under this head.
The critics of the Victorian age inherited from Lamb, Coleridge,
Hazlitt and Carlyle a tradition which was certainly more whole-
some than that which had prevailed in the days of Gifford and
Jeffrey; and, thanks to this tradition, criticism grew decidedly
more urbane. The oldest of this group by many years was Abraham
Hayward, who is now, perhaps, best known as author of The Art
of Dining, a volume made up, like much of Hayward's work, of
contributions to periodicals written long before their separate
publication. But Hayward began with work of a widely different
sort-a very good prose translation of Faust; and he never
abandoned his interest in Goethe. Near the end of his life, he
himself published a volume on the poet whom he had begun by
translating. He was interested in other foreign writers also, and
contributed to The Edinburgh Review articles on the countess
Hahn-Hahn and on Stendhal, at a time when these authors
were hardly known in England. Hayward could draw a good
biographical sketch or build up a very readable article out of


## p. 139 (#169) ############################################

CH. 11] Brimley. Dallas
139
anecdotes, just as he made his reputation in society from the same
materials; and his articles on contemporaries, such as those on
Sydney Smith and Samuel Rogers, are valuable for their personal
reminiscences. He could also construct an ingenious argument,
as in his More about Junius. But, for critical principles, we
search his works in vain. Somewhat akin to Hayward in his love
of anecdote, though inferior to him, was John Doran, the pleasant
author of Knights and their Days and Their Majesties' Servants.
The latter contains much information, but seems to have no clear
end in view, and has little depth of scholarship.
Doran's reputation among contemporaries is evidence that the
level of criticism about the middle of the nineteenth century was
low. It was, however, soon to be raised. Ruskin, who, inciden-
tally, is a critic of literature as well as of painting, published his
first volume of real weight in 1843. The Germ, the organ of the
pre-Raphaelites, appeared in 18501. And Matthew Arnold's earliest
critical essay was prefixed to his Poems of 1853. That stirring of
the spirit which their appearance indicated was shown, also, in the
critical work of George Brimley, whose feeble health, resulting in
an early death, alone prevented him from winning a great name.
His most notable criticism, and the only one to which he affixed
his name, was the essay on Tennyson which appeared in Cambridge
Essays in 1855. Though he is less than just to Tennyson's Poems
of 1830, holding that they ‘scarcely reach the altitudes of common
sense,' and condemning the 'perverse, unreal treatment' in the
poems inscribed with the names of women, yet, with perfect com-
prehension, he traces the evolution of Tennyson's art from 1830
to 1842. While none of the other essays can rank with that on
Tennyson, they are generally right in tone and substance.
In the case of Brimley, principles are rather implied than
stated; they are to be inferred from his judgments on particular
works. The attempts in English to make the statement of a
principle the main object have been few and incomplete; but,
among the few, that of Eneas Sweetland Dallas deserves honourable
mention. Both by blood and by training, Dallas was drawn
towards a philosophical treatment of his subject, for he was of
Scottish parentage, and he studied at Edinburgh under Sir William
Hamilton. His journalistic career carried him, at times, far enough
away from philosophy; but, when he had leisure to write a volume,
his thoughts took a philosophic cast-both in the somewhat
immature Poetics, an Essay on Poetry, and in that unhappily
See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. v.
a


## p. 140 (#170) ############################################

140
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
named book, The Gay Science. How he came to write, also, the
pseudonymous Kettner's Book of the Table, a Manual of Cookery, it
is not altogether easy to understand. The Gay Science is, certainly,
one of the most remarkable works of its class that we possess. It
is, first of all, lucid both in thought and in style; and it is suggestive
in a very rare degree. The preface proclaims that the author's
purpose is 'to settle the first principles of Criticism. ' But, while
Dallas feels himself to be a pioneer, he is not unconscious of the
limits of his actual achievement, and admits that he has done little
more than lay down the groundwork of a science. It must be
remembered that his design was never carried to completion; there
were to have been four volumes, but only two were written. The
incurable English distrust of system condemned the book to oblivion.
The Gay Science is psychological from the foundation, and, in more
points than one, anticipates by a generation the development of
opinion. In nothing is this anticipation more remarkable than in
Dallas's view of what is now called the subliminary self. This, he
holds, lies at the root of all art. Aristotle's theory that art is
imitation, is, in his opinion, false, and ‘has transmitted an heredi-
tary squint to criticism. ' What art does is not to imitate what
any eye can see, but, rather, to bring into clear vision what is
first apprehended only by 'the hidden soul. ' Art has to do with
pleasure, but not alone with the pleasure which the sensual man
recognises as such ; there is hidden pleasure, as well as a hidden
soul. It is everywhere the subliminary self which is active in art,
and the subliminary self to which true art appeals. Dallas prided
himself most of all on his analysis of imagination, and imagination
he pronounced to be ‘but another name for the automatic action
of the mind or any of its faculties. Everywhere, then, The Gay
Science moves in the region of ideas. Dallas has a refreshing
confidence that there is a cause for everything in art as well as in
physical science : a cause, for example, why the earlier poets of
modern civilisation delight most of all in sunrise, while those of
the nineteenth century delight in sunset. This is clearly an im-
portation, through Hamilton, of the German spirit; and, if Dallas
appears to be guilty of that excess with which he charged German
criticism that it is 'all idea '-it must be remembered that his
work is incomplete, and that the unwritten concluding volumes
would have redressed the balance.
On a lower plane stood James Hannay, who had ended a naval,
and begun a literary, career before he was twenty. It was not
unnatural that his experience in the navy should suggest the
6


## p. 141 (#171) ############################################

111]
Bagehot. Hutton
141
a
possibility that he might follow in the steps of Marryat, and
Singleton Fontenoy and a collection of short stories are based
upon that experience. But the knowledge of a boy could furnish
no such groundwork as Marryat's long years of storm and battle.
Hannay turned, rather, to criticism, and, in the essays contributed
to The Quarterly Review, which were afterwards reprinted, as
well as in the lectures entitled Satire and Satirists, he showed
taste and judgment.
About the same time, both Walter Bagehot and Richard Holt
Hutton began to write. They were associated for nine years as
joint editors of The National Review; and Hutton's fine memoir
of his colleague bears testimony to the closeness of their friendship.
Of the two, Hutton, though far the less gifted, was, as a literary
critic, the more influential; for Bagehot was, essentially, a publicist,
and his Literary Studies, a collection of papers contributed to
The National Review from the early fifties onwards, are little
more than a by-product; while, in Hutton's case, notwithstanding
the theological inclinations shown in a volume on cardinal Newman,
in Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought and in one of the
volumes of Essays, Theological and Literary, the critical element
is the most important. Yet, Hutton is rarely free from some
preoccupation which is not purely literary. His personal tastes,
first of all, were theological; and, in literature, he most willingly
dealt with writers in whom some theological interest was either
latent or explicit. It was partly, at least, this that made him the
consistent though discriminating admirer of the verse of Matthew
Arnold. He detected that undertone in Arnold to which critics
indifferent to such interests have been deaf. On the other hand,
this preoccupation narrowed Hutton's range. To purely aesthetic
considerations he was not highly sensitive, and his criticisms are
not, intrinsically, of very great value. But Hutton was more than
himself. For over thirty years he was one of the editors of The
Spectator ; in no small degree he impressed upon that journal his
own character; and, in estimating his significance, heed must be
paid to the great influence it wielded under his control.
Bagehot was an editor, too; but the most important part of his
editorial career was that in which he conducted The Economist.
It thus emphasises his work as economist and publicist rather
than his work as literary critic, and readers will grieve or rejoice
according to their taste. Undoubtedly, Bagehot had gifts
that would have secured great success in either sphere. If his
reputation is, even now, below his deserts, it is probably because


## p. 142 (#172) ############################################

142
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH.
his interests were varied and his energies, in consequence, dis-
sipated. He is at once biographer, critic, economist and publicist.
In his critical essays, the keen incisive phrases, the humour, the
penetrating analyses of character, the touches of philosophy, give
the impression of the presence of a great man. Bagehot was
never content to play upon the surface, he sought to penetrate to
the principle underneath. He had the qualifications requisite to
make him what Dallas called a systematic critic. But, as he did
not choose to concentrate himself upon literature, his criticism,
though brilliant, remains fragmentary. In Biographical Studies,
another collection of contributions to periodicals, Bagehot's
interest in politics comes into the foreground. Even in his
literary essays it could not be entirely suppressed: there is, for
example, an analysis of the forms of social organisation in the
paper on Sterne and Thackeray. In other respects, his bio-
graphical sketches show much the same qualities as his literary
essays; and the resemblance is all the closer because his
critical essays largely depend for their effect upon insight into
character. When Bagehot wrote about Shakespeare, he chose,
characteristically enough, to lay emphasis on the man, rather than
on the poet or the playwright. In Biographical Studies, there
are the same short crisp sentences that we find in Literary Studies,
the same epigrammatic point, the same humour, the same abound-
ing life, the same easy, sometimes colloquial, diction.
But it was to his work as economist and as publicist that
Bagehot gave the greatest part of his strength. He is at his best
in Lombard Street and in The English Constitution? Some, it is
true, have set Physics and Politics above either. But Physics
and Politics has not worn so well as the other two; its con-
temporary influence was due, not exclusively to its intrinsic
merits, but, partly, to a deft application of the conception of evolu-
tion to political society, an application which seemed more original
than it really was. Yet, the other two books might have been
expected to show the more serious signs of wear. The laws of
human society at large are more stable than the forms of a given
constitution; and political economy has been largely revolu-
tionised since Bagehot wrote. Even the most conservative is now
more socialistic than would have seemed possible to Bagehot and
to the vast majority of his contemporaries. But, in spite of this,
Lombard Street and The English Constitution are almost as fresh
as they were at first. The reason is that they are descriptive
1 See, ante, chap. I.


## p. 143 (#173) ############################################

111]
Leslie Stephen
143
of an actual state of affairs. No change which has taken place,
or which may take place, in the organisation of the money market
can invalidate Bagehot's lively and entertaining analysis of the
money market of his day. The facts were open to all, yet no one
knew how to interpret them till Bagehot, in Lombard Street,
showed the way. So, too, of The English Constitution. It is not
a history, but a philosophical discussion. Stubbs and Hallam and
May tell the story of three stages of the growth of the constitu-
tion ; Bagehot appraises the actual values of the elements of the
constitution. It was a work no less difficult, no less valuable, than
that of the historian, but it called for a gift of a different sort :
not the gift of research but that of speculative insight; not
learning, but philosophy. Bagehot is comparable, not to Stubbs,
but to Burke; and, while he is inferior to the great Irishman,
;
there is no other writer of English to whom, on this his special
ground, he need yield the palm. It needed a great mind to penetrate
the hollowness of the theory of checks and balances, and to
discover that a board of gentlemen with no legal status possesses
more real power than either king or lords or commons.
Sir Leslie Stephen showed a similar diversity of interests. The
first volume that bore his name was the collection of agreeable
essays on mountaineering entitled The Playground of Europe ;
but he had already published anonymously a series of humorous
and satirical Sketches from Cambridge, and, under initials, a grave
statement of the case for the North in the United States civil
war. Yet another vein is opened in Essays on Free Thinking
and Plain Speaking ; for Stephen was one of the numerous
men of letters who were troubled by the difficulty of reconciling
modern thought and the discoveries of modern science with tradi-
tional beliefs. Before this volume appeared, however, Stephen
had become editor of The Cornhill Magazine, a post which he
held from 1871 till 1882, when he assumed the still heavier burden
of editing The Dictionary of National Biography. Stephen
seems to have felt, at times, that editorial work was drudgery;
but, at least, as contributor to The Cornhill Magazine, he had a
free hand; and the three series of Hours in a Library made up of
his articles may fairly be taken to show him at his best as a critic.
On the other hand, the plan of the great Dictionary necessarily
limited his freedom, and the 378 articles covering 1000 pages
which he contributed to it must be read with this consideration
in view. They are, essentially, biographical, and only incidentally
critical. The necessity of thus conforming to a plan, however,


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144
[Ch.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
meant to Stephen by no means what it would have meant to such
a critic as Coleridge or as Arnold. That his natural bent was
towards biography is shown not only in his Studies of a Biographer,
but in all his fine contributions to the two series of English Men
of Letters,' and, above all, in the admirable monograph on Johnson.
Stephen's most ambitious and weightiest books, however, lie out-
side the sphere both of literary criticism and of biography.
They are contributions to philosophy, History of English Thought
in the Eighteenth Century and The English Utilitarians—and
have been considered elsewhere in the present volumel Like the
fine essay, An Agnostic's Apology, they reveal Stephen as a
rationalist, and suggest an explanation of his limits as a critic.
His ear was keen for what is heard in literature, but a little
dull to what is overheard ; and, so, he is apt to be warmer in
writing about the school of Pope than he is when he deals with
the romantic poets.
The tendency of periodicals, the contributions to which, until
recently, have been unsigned, has been to make the literary life,
for a time, flow, as it were, underground. Thus, Leslie Stephen
was nearly forty before his name became familiar to the public
outside literary circles. Though Richard Garnett was a younger
man by several years, a different mode of publication gave him
a status in literature earlier than Stephen. He sought fame first
as a poet; but, though he had a true lyrical gift, it was neither
very strong nor very original ; and, so, the poetical strain in him
does better service in imparting an aroma to his criticism than
when it impels him to write verse. He was a master of the art of
writing literary biography, and nothing of the same kind shows
a defter touch than his unpretending but masterly primer on
Coleridge or his monograph on Carlyle. The most original of his
works is The Twilight of the Gods, a collection of singular tales in
which he shows an unexpected power of sarcasm.