MR. BRIGHT AS AN OLD-TESTAMENT WORTHY.
1T R. BRIGHT, in his striking little speech at Birmingham on
11 the occasion of his re-election, likened his own feelings, when asked to become a Minister of the Crown, to those of " the great woman " of Shunem, in one of the most pathetic and striking of all the narratives of the Old Testament, who, when entreated by the prophet Elisha to tell him how he could use his interest for her " with the King or the captain of the host," answered, with grave simplicity, " I dwell among mine own people." It is not for the first time, and probably not for the twentieth, that Mr. Bright, in his speeches, has had recourse to the language of the Old Testament to express with the greater force and vividness the true feeling at the bottom of his heart. The present writer remembers perfectly the effect produced upon a vast audience iu the days of Free-Trade monster meetings by the conclusion of one of Mr. Bright's speeches for untaxed bread, in which he reminded his audience of what "royal lips had uttered on divine authority, ' that the poor should not always be forgotten, that the patient abiding of the meek should not perish for ever.' " Quite lately he concluded one of his finest speeches on Ireland by reminding the House of Com- mons,—au audience rarely addressed in language of that kind,— of the promise that " to the upright there ariseth light in the darkness." With a little patience we could easily multiply many fold the proofs how deeply ingrained in Mr. Bright's imagination is the grave and sententious passion of the Old Testament. We do not, indeed, mean that either free trade or household suffrage are well-marked Old Testament ideas,—that David wished for a foreign policy of non-intervention,—that Solomon had conceived even that necessary preliminary to the policy of a " free break- fast-table," a taxed breakfast-table,—or that the compound house- holder of Birmingham was anticipated among the citizens of Joppa, Jericho, or Jerusalem. The Old Testament references to foreign policy are couched much more in the tone of Mr. Bright's memorable "Perish, Savoy I" than iu the tone of his universal- brotherhood speeches. Indeed, Moab and Edom are not unfre- quently referred to in the Old Testament in terms not unlike those used by Mr. Bright of Turkey or Savoy, or any other State for whom England might be expected to go to war, and which Mr. Bright would at such times gladly declare to be his " wash-pot," or aspire to " cast his shoe " over them,— not for good luck. Otherwise Mr. Bright is not quite in sympathy with the tone of the Old Testament on foreign policy. Ezekiel apparently did not approve of Tyre's being a free port, and the trade with the Isles of Chittim,—the islands of the Mediterranean,—was by no means a matter of congratulation with him ; and yet his denunciation of the unright- eous traffic of Tyre,—apparently the Greek slave trade, the trade with " Javan in the persons of men,"—was couched in language not unlike some of Mr. Bright's. In short, though we are by no means disposed to think of the middle-class Member for Birming- ham as strongly resembling an old Hebrew statesman or prophet, yet there is just enough of the Old Testament stamp in him to produce a certain grandeur and picturesqueness of effect in its con- trast with the indistinct political types of our modern days. In contrast, at least, to his chief colleagues,—to Mr. Gladstone, in whom religious and secular qualities are curiously mixed and con- fused, in a subtle amalgam of what we may call confluent contraries, reminding one more of the mixtures of type characteristic of worthies of the New Testament era than of the grand and simple outlines of the Old,—to Mr. Cardwell, who assuredly sug- gests nothing less than such a Hebrew minister of war as Joab,— to Mr. Lowe, whose mere existence tends to make the previous existence of Isaiah difficult of belief to a vivid imagination,—in contrast to these, at least, Mr. Bright seems to reassure us that the race of the Old Testament is really of one stock with the humanity of our own country and day. And there may be some interest, if there is not much instruction, in noting the features to which we refer, and which import, as we think, through Mr. Bright, some snatch of the stateliness and passion (in its higher sense) of that great history into our rather petty, feverish, and technical modern politics.
In the first place, there is something of the stately simplicity of the Old Testament about Mr. Bright's political style, and in his constant and profound insight into the relation of politics to domestic life. The confession in his speech the other day that it bad been his ambition to grow a freer man as he grew older, whereas he found himself becoming more and more fettered by his obligations to his friends, his party, and his country, his evidently sincere expres- sion of feeling that 'to speak for him' to the Queen was doing him the very opposite of a personal service, since, like "the great woman" of Shunem, he " dwelt among his own people," is a fair illus- tration of this simplicity. But there are other instances still more striking, not only of this dignified simplicity, but of that value for domestic life as at the heart of national life, which reminds us of the political tone of a period when a shepherd was on the throne, and his ministers and friends brought home to him his sins as a king, by the freshest and simplest incidents taken from domestic life. Who but Mr. Bright could have spoken to the House of Commons,—and spoken to it with the greatest effect,—in such language as this, in pleading for a definite line of policy on the great Civil War in America ?—" I want to know whether you feel as I feel on this question. When I can get down to my home from this House, I find half-a- dozen little children playing upon my hearth. How many mem- bers are there who can say with me that the most innocent, the most pure, the most holy joy which in their past years they have felt, or in their future years they have hoped for, has not risen from contact and association with our precious children ? Well, then, if that be so, if, when the band of death takes one of these flowers from our dwelling, our heart is over- whelmed with sorrow and our household is covered with gloom, what would it be if our children were brought up to this infernal system,—one hundred and fifty thousand of them every year brought into the world in these Slave States, amongst their gen- tlemen,' amongst this ' chivalry,' amongst these men that we can make our friends?" The grave simplicity and the power of simple domestic feeling in that passage, made subservient, as it was, to a political rebuke in the most reticent and fastidious political assembly in the world, has scarcely any better parallel — different as of course the style must neces- sarily be,—than Nathan's narrative to David of the pet lamb stolen by the rich man from the poor.
And this tendency of Mr. Bright's to reduce political policy and events as far as he can to their real meaning in their bearing on domestic life, though it does, we think, not unfrequently mislead him into a view of war more humane than just, is closely allied with another great quality in which he shows some affinity to the statesmen of the Old Testament, —the faculty of vision which, wherever it can, puts a picture in the place of an argument. Political economy truly understood requires a good deal of imagination in one sense, but it is the clear imagination of intrinsically uninteresting transactions. Mr. Bright, however, even in his speeches on Free Trade, translates his arguments into pictures of a higher kind, pictures requiring power and passion to paint. Does not this bit of a speech delivered in 1845 at a meet- ing of the Anti-Corn Law League, considered as a plea against the Corn Laws, imply a very remarkable faculty of vision,—something indeed of a Hebrew seer's power, though applied to a different field of thought?—" Since the time when we first came to London to ask the attention of Parliament to the question of the Corn Law two millions of human beings have been added to the population of the United Kingdom. The table is here as before ; the food is spread in about the same quantity as before ; but two millions of fresh guests have arrived These two millions are so many arguments for the Anti-Corn Law League,—so many emphatic condemnations of the policy of this iniquitous law. I see them now in my mind's eye ranged before me, old men and young chil- dren, all looking to the Government for bread, some endeavouring to resist the stroke of famine, clamorous and turbulent, but still arguing with us,—some dying mute and uncomplaining. Multi- tudes have died of hunger in the United Kingdom since we first asked the Government to repeal the Corn Law, and although the great and powerful may not regard those who suffer mutely and die in silence, yet the recording angel will note down their patient endurance and the heavy guilt of those by whom they have been sacrificed." Has not that in it a snatch of some of the prophetic descriptions of famine? "Lift up thy hands towards the Lord for the life of thy young children that faint for hunger in the top
of every street The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets."
Again, Mr. Bright's power of wrath,—not personal vindictive- nets, for no man is usually less personal than Mr. Bright in his
assaults, though he did once withstand Mr. Disraeli to the face for his "mixture of servility and pomposity," — but his power of concentrating into a sentence scorn and loathing for a policy that he thinks dishonest and injurious, is quite Hebrew in its force. We need only remind our readers of his denunciation of the policy of building the Alabama :— " There may be men outside, there are men sitting amongst your legislators, who will build and equip corsair ships to prey upon the commerce of a friendly power,—who will disregard the laws and the honour of their country,—who will trample on the procla- mation of their Sovereign, and who for the sake of the glittering profit that sometimes waits on crime will cover themselves witfe everlasting infamy." Has not that in it some of that old Hebrew wrath,--anger which is not mortification, not, even in the least degree, personal irritation, but that impersonal wrath which dilates• character, the sort of wrath which Luther said was purifying, and without which he could not write ?
Most of all, Mr. Bright is, we will not say, the most religious of our statesmen,—he is probably not so, certainly not more pro- foundly religious than the Prime Minister,—but his religion is of the Old Testament type. We do not mean this in the sense of eccle- siastics, we do not mean that it rests more on "the law" and less on the love of God than that of other public men ; but that it is of the Old Testament type in the sense of affecting him directly through his political imagination, in the sense of giving to the larger questions of political life a special religious bearing, which they have not, at least do not seem to have, in the minds of other statesmen. Of course, numbers of politicians besides Mr. Bright use the ordinary formula; about " Providential" guidance. But Mr. Bright does not speak in formulae. He may not indeed exactly believe in the " Lord of Hosts," though even of that he showed traces during the great civil war in the United States.. But he does believe in One who overrules the evil actions even of armies, and who brings light out of darkness' for the upright, where man would least expect it. " Whether," he said, five years ago, " whether the war in the United States will give freedom to the race which white men have trampled in the dust, and whether the issue will purify a nation steeped in crimes against that race, is known only to the Supreme. In His hands are alike the breath of man and the life of States. I am willing to commit to Him, the issue of this dread contest ; but I implore of Him, and I beseech this House, that my country may lift nor hand nor voice in aid of the most stupendous act of guilt that history has recorded in the annals of mankind." That cer- tainly is not couched in the primitive and simple style of the Old Testament. But remembering that it was spoken in the House of Commons, it has the impress of that large and devout faith in God's government of the world which is rarely enough expressed by our politicians, and which gives to politics a solemnity and grandeur of the ancient and higher kind.
We are by no means insensible to those political qualities of Mr. Bright's which tend to identify him with some of the• poorest elements of our modern middle-class prejudice. Still, take him as a whole, and we shall scarcely find another statesman in the House who does so much to give to our political life the simplicity of a passion that is neither petty nor personal ; the vision of one who sees many of those implied meanings of abstract policy on which other men only reason and think ; who expresses, with so great a power to kindle in others, the wrath which political meanness and selfishness deserve ; and who discerns so steadily, through the blinding twilight which we call+ day, the vision of a world of order diviner and nobler than our own. Surely, with all his faults, Mr. Bright is not a figure whom our national Parliament could spare.
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