THE EARLY " EDINBURGH REVIEW " AND LORD BROUGHAM.
WHENEVER Mr. Macvey Napier judges it right to publish the very entertaining volume of the Correspondence of various distinguished men with his father during his editorship of the Edinburgh Review, probably the first impres- sion made on the mind of the readers of the volume will be one of admiration and sympathy for the temper and ability with which Mr. Napier managed Lord Brougham.
An uglier steed to drive could hardly be imagined. Often he is like a vicious horse in a tandem,—turns round, and stares in his driver's face with the most unpleasant imaginable demon- strations both of power, and of a dangerous disposition as regards the use of it. Wheneverhe feels the bit at all, be kicks dangerously at one or other of his yokefellows,—probably Empson or Macaulay,— and tries to get the bit between his teeth as well. But more curious even than these demonstrations of an unmanageable disposition, is the way in which he is managed, after all. Mr. Macvey Napier must have been a very able and cool hand at treating such a
nature as Brougham's. But besides the ability in Mr. Napier's handling of the reins which the readers of this correspondence are rather permitted to infer than observe,—to infer, for instance, from the curious way in which Brougham retreats from his most unplea- sant suggestions of threat or opposition, whenever he has to send a rejoinder to one of Mr. Macvey Napier's replies (which are not preserved for us),--what strikes us almost equally is the help- lessness of all this superabundant force in Lord Brougham. Brougham chafes and kicks, and as we should say in relation to a horse, buck-jumps, but he has no clear idea as to what he would do, if he could manage to unseat his rider, and so he does not very seriously attempt it, though he makes all the use he can of his dangerous temper, with a view to getting more of his own way. When Mr. Napier hinted, as he appears to have done, at resigning the editorship, Lord Brougham is not pl eased, but dismayed. Though at the time Brougham was talking of start- ing a rival Review—a A'cw Edinburgh—he is so little serious about it, he is so evidently using it only as a diplomatic feint for getting more of his own way in the Edinburgh as it was, that be treats Mr. Napier's resignation as an impossibility, and even as the surest way of forcing him to start the imaginary rival which he had been flourishing before Mr. Napier's eyes. There is not a position Brougham takes up which lie does not evacuate so soon as Mr. Napier seriously attacks it,—if we may judge, as we said before, from Lord Brougham's rejoinders to replies which we have not got. And the reason of this helplessness is obvious. Lord Brougham himself hardly knew what he wanted, except that he wanted his own way. What his own way was, it would have been impossible to predict for even a few months together. It is amusing enough to find him, for instance, in 1839, speaking of the British Association for the Advancement of Science as a " cursed quack-mob meeting at Brummagem," especially when we remember that in his own old age he was the figure-head of the Social Science Association started in friendly emulation of the older Society for the advancement of physical science, and that he expatiated away there to his own great content and everybody else's fatigue and despair. If Lord Brougham had a single consistent principle all through his career, it was a desire for the popularisation of Science, but no sooner did he find a scientific assembly for popularising Science which did not meet his own views, than he writes of it thus :—" These scientific (God help us) assemblages are be- coming a positive nuisance. I declared war on the evils they were inflicting on taste in scientific men in my Dialogues.' Now they are going further, and we shall be called in our police capacity " [i.e., we suppose, as Edinburgh Reviewers] " to crush them." But as we have said, as soon as Lord Brougham was made the chief hero of such an association, we heard no more of this "cursed quack-mob meeting," or of the necessity "in our police capacity" of putting them down. And this is, though a small, a most instructive illustration of the deepest deficiency in Brougham,—a want of constant aim and purpose for that huge, that almost incredible, medley of energies which, had they been under steady guidance and discipline, would have been like the energy of a crowd commanded by a single will. As it was, it was the energy of a crowd commanded by a crowd of different wills, though all of them the capricious wills of Henry Brougham.
And we think we see clearly that after some dim fashion Brougham recognised the blind character of his own Titanic strength,—his want of clear guidance. His own hundred minds or so as to what he would do, fatally paralysed the force of the hundred bands with which he did anything that he had once resolved to do ; and though he could not help freely reviling the colleagues who differed from him, yet he shrank from the experi- ment of steering his own bark as a man of literature, and soon failed in the effort to take a line of his own as a statesman ; for that line was a succession of short tacks in which he lost all dis- tinct idea of where he was going to. And yet his self-confidence was immeasurable. When the false report of his death got abroad in 1839, he wrote that his relations with the Government had im- proved by the lesson they had received :—" They were, I find, quite stunned to find the sensation caused by my departure from this lower world. Their silly vanity and the flattery of their sycophants, and the noise of their vile newspapers, had really made them fancy that I was utterly gone into oblivion. They have now found a marvellous difference, for they are obliged to admit that they and all their people might have died, and been quietly buried, compared with my decease. Indeed, I was myself astonished. The result is a kind of good-feeling being re-estab- lished, with all but a very few. With the bulk of the party and with the Court, I am in charity. The Queen and Melbourne
behaved very well indeed. They sent an express up to this house, who returned with the news that more than two thousand per-
sons had been here, and that the street was still crowded, I
dwell on these particulars, to show you how little trust you are to put in the venal herd who supply the newspapers with paragraphs
on public men." It is hardly possible for any man to express more haughtily his consciousness of greatness than Brougham expresses it here. Yet it did not give him any new depar- ture in life. Since his severance from the Whigs he had been
paralysed ; and even after this experience of the consequence in which he was held by the English people, he remained as impotent politically as ever, till in 1843 he finally broke even with the Edinburgh Review, and remained a mere fragment and vestige of the past for the quarter of a century during which he still con- tinued to live. No phrase could be truer than to say that he was in his best time a host in himself, for he had, what the phrase is seldom intended to imply, all the weaknesses and dangers as well as all the force belonging to a host that is liable to be deprived of its leader ; he had its might for all well-defined and inspiring popular purposes,—its hesitating and vacillating condi- tion of mind when these purposes were fulfilled or were no longer there,—its fierce jealousy of control,—its absolute need of con- trol,—and its fruitless fury when defeated by weaker but more disciplined foes.
With the secession of Lord Brougham, and Mr. Napier's resignation of the editorship, which followed a year or two after, —Lord Jeffrey and Sydney Smith having long ceased to contribute, or to contribute anything of the slightest importance, to the Review,—the original Edinburgh Review, the Edinburgh Review which first startled Englishmen into seeing the number and gross- ness of their political and other superstitions, virtually ceased to exist. So long as Lord Brougham still wrote for it his vivid and often savage sketches of the statesmen of his youth, it retained at least a flavour of its ancient life,—that life of swift windy scorn, and bitter impatience with much which deserved little but impatience, and much more which deserved to be understood, but was not understood—by its critics at all events,—that made it so great a power in the beginning of the century. We have taken a view of Lord Brougham which will be regarded as very depreciating. Yet, looking back on the Edinburgh Review now, even with the help of the criticisms which Lord Jeffrey and his companions passed on their youthful labours in their maturer life, we cannot help recording our belief that when all is said, when Sydney Smith's brilliant wit is appraised at its fall value, and Lord Jeffrey's shrewdness is assigned the import- ance it deserves for keeping something like order amongst the contributors, as well as for adding much that was very clever as well, Brougham was the stormy force which made the early Edinburgh Review so useful. As Macaulay well says, in this volume, " Brougham does one thing well, two or three things indifferently, and a hundred things detestably. His Parliamentary speaking is admirable, his forensic speaking poor, his writings, at the very best, second-rate. As to his hydrostatics, his political philosophy, his equity judgments, his translations from the Greek, they are really below contempt." Whereas Lord Jeffrey, on the contrary, as Macaulay also said, did almost everything he did at all in a manner which his own age at least thought creditable. This is true enough, but then Brougham, while he was still attacking real and gross evils, was, even as a writer, a much more formidable assailant than all the others put together, partly because he was such a miscellany of superficial forces. Assuredly, the group of utilitarians who started the Edinburgh were much more cliquish in their ideas than the great ally who joined them at the third number. Take, for instance, this remark of Lord Jeffrey's, written in his old age, in 1848, on Sir James Stephen's great article on " Hildebrand," and we shall see, almost more than in his famous poohpoohiug of Wordsworth, the extreme limitation of the man's ideas :—" ' Hildebrand' is inferior to most, I would say to any, of Stephen's former articles, though less from any inferiority in graphic descriptions and scenes of effect, than from the intrac- table nature of the subject, or rather the impossibility of now giving any intelligible or consistent account either of the char- acters or the transactions of that distant age. The whole proceedings, of which so bright and richly coloured a summary is here attempted, are, after all, to me as entirely unaccountable, and indeed as utterly inconsistent and inconceivable, as the legends of the Dlahabarat or the worst of the Eddas ; and in spite of many most audacious and unwarranted suppositions and implied theories, leave no impression on my mind but that of a brilliant confusion, and no more sense of truth or coherent reality than I should receive from an old painted window, with its strange groupings of kneeling bishops, and helmeted kings, blazoned shields, and streaming labarums, angels, demons, virgins, and constellations." That is perhaps the most remarkable passage in this remarkable correspondence. And it certainly proves the power of Jeffrey to have been greatly due to his extreme and intensely-marked limitations. Brougham, hasty, ill-regulated, self-important as he was, could not have written that. His very miscellaneousness, superficial as it was, gave him more sympathy with other ages and ideas than the shrill, shrewd Scotch lawyer ever had. In fact, though Brougham was something of a hurricane which blew itself out early in life, yet without him the Edinburgh Review would never have been what it once was, and what it ceased to be pretty nearly when he ceased to write for it.
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