TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. BRIGHT'S RESIGNATION.
I F Mr. Bright has, as we should fear to be probable, vanished out of public life, no less than out of the Cabinet, his is a loss which will be very serious to the English Parliament, and which we see at present no sign that any other man can supply. His function was to give passion, colour, vivid popular feeling, to political debate ; to make Parliament see how particular questions affected the people, whether it were reasonable or not that they should be so affected ; to dispel by a single one of his weighty, vigorous, and glowing sentences the illusion that a dry man's dry reasons can turn the scale of popular opinion in a country governed by the people ; to make the House recognize fully the great natural forces at work with which Parliament must reckon, whether it proposes to yield to these forces, or to resist them, or to take an intermediate line of compromise. Without Mr. Bright the House will be with- out one of the great data for deliberation. Many other speakers have cooler heads and more impartial judgments ; many have a weightier logic and a greater wealth of statesman- like resource ; but no other speaker ever placed before the House with a vividness that so compelled respect and attention, even if it often roused angry resistance, the real mainsprings of the popular feeling. Mr. Bright was often charged with appealing to the passions of the multitude, and no charge could be truer. Of course he did. His political nature was an embodiment of those passions, and he could no more help appealing to them than a poet can help appealing to the imagination, or a musician to the sense of music. But what- ever may be said of his functions as an agitator,—and no agitator was ever more successful, and more successful, too, in the most fortunate way, tnat of exciting the premature passion which anticipates and provides against the far more dangerous outburst of passion long suppressed,—nobody can doubt that for Parliament it was a pure gain to have constantly before it this miniature of the latent volcanic forces of the people, without constant and explicit reference to which all legislation is apt to be theoretic and rootless. No doubt, Mr. Bright often opposed and defeated thoroughly reasonable measures. But thoroughly reasonable measures may be very un- desirable measures, if they have already excited against them a great weight of popular prejudice, however groundless. And this was just what Mr. Bright's presence in Parliament effec- tually tested. If his heavy artillery could not penetrate the thick reason-plating of the statesmen, it was passion-proof, and we might trust to the popular recognition of that fact in due time.. If his great discharges rent and pierced the in- tellectual armour of the politicians, no matter how good or powerful that armour might have been, it was not suited for the use of a nation whose political institutions are founded upon popular favour. And this, too, indicates the service which Mr. Bright, had he retained his health, might have rendered to the Cabinet,—the use which, in the case of the Irish-Church question, he probably did render to the Cabinet. His view of a policy or a new measure must have been, in some respects, a perfect epitome of a popular view in- termediate between the eager democratic feeling and the average middle-class prepossession, and it would have been sure to be presented with a certain breadth and glow that would ensure it a full measure of attention. Mr. Bright must have been as instructive to an intelligent Cabinet as a pocket popular meeting, if you could conceive such a thing, expressly engaged to debate the Cabinet's measures in the Cabinet's presence without revealing its secrets. No doubt, his contemptuous aversion to the interference of Government at all in ordinary matters might at times, if he had remained in the Cabinet long, have weighed oppressively on con- structive schemes. But no one can doubt the great advantage to a Cabinet of having all the winds of popular feeling con- fined, like Eurus and Notus in the cave of ZEolus, in the breast of one of its own members.
But besides the probable loss to the House and the certain loss to the Cabinet of actual service, the country itself cannot help feeling a certain amount of pain at the prospect of the disappearance of so grand an energy from political life. Whatever Mr. Bright has been, he has never failed to be in- teresting. His speeches have excited all kinds and amounts of sympathy and antipathy, but they have never fallen dead. They have quickened the pulses of our somewhat apathetic object of interest to the whole civilized world. They are-, perhaps, the only political speeches as yet existing which may be studied whenever and if ever English becomes a dead language, as the speeches of Demosthenes are studied by modern Europe now. There may have been greater English orators, but they lived before the age of accurate reporting. There are Parliamentary orators as great still left, but they do not throw into their language that vast weight of passion and character which is requisite to give interest to speeches whose occasions have passed away. Mr. Disraeli's speeches might continue to have a certain literary interest, but the pun- gency and humour of their raillery will become unintelligible as the individual figures against whom his arrows were aimed vanish from the stage and are no more known. Mr. Gladstone's speeches are in some cases too much business speeches, in other cases too diffuse and indirect in their argument, to arrest the attention of future generations. The late Mr. Cobden's speeches, though models of lucid exposition and shrewd illustration, have a little too much of the dry light' of the understanding to stir the hearts even of the twenty-first or twenty-second century. But Mr. Bright's speeches are the very models of classical oratory. The orations against Catiline have not half the concentrated weight of brooding fire in them which are contained in Mr. Blight's denunciations of the Slaveholders' rebellion. Some of the speeches on behalf of Ireland would compare for weight and power of eloquence with the finest fragments of the speeches of Caius an Tiberius Gracchus on the question of the public land. Nay, they rise at times into the grandeur and faith of the Hebrew pro- phet's vision. No doubt, on the other hand, they often assume a tone which jars upon the ear as selfish and mercantile. But even then they embody the fervour of a passionate impression and the scorn of dogmatic prejudice towards ancient tradition. If ever modern eloquence is studied as the old classical orators are studied, Mr. Blight's has a better chance than the eloquence of any other Englishman who has ever lived. There is in his speeches the compressed life that defies time, that kindles, the reader as it kindles the hearers.
The loss of such a figure,—if we are to lose it, or even to lose the most characteristic signs of it, —from our political world is a loss we can ill afford. The tendency of modern politics, disembarrassed from the great controversies of the past, is to degenerate in dignity and interest,—to assume the United States' type of local and almost parochial minuteness. Every really great figure who enters our political world post- pones for us this danger. Mr. Bright has done much to post- pone it, and to raise the standard of political feeling among Radicals, if not of political thought. He may have done little as a minister, though he undoubtedly gave to the first great measure of the present Administration a most powerful and weighty support. But as a Radical and a Democrat he has. taught the nation to measure popular feeling by a high standard,—a standard beside which all mob-oratory is at once perceived to be artificial and dishonest,—and this alone has purified the atmosphere of the political school he represented, while his grand and nervous English has left to English literature a rich legacy of renown.
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