LORD BROUGHAM.
PROBABLY the hugest human phenomenon of our century has passed away in the death of Lord Brougham. He was the Demiurgus of Liberalism during the early part of the century, and brooded over the various germs of in- tellectual, moral, and political innovation, widely scattered and much needed in that day, with a rich fecundity of result the benefits of which the present generation are by no means likely ever adequately to appreciate. He was in restless energy rather a hundred men than one, and, moreover, for all the unity of design,—the intellectual unity,—that he gave to the various branches of his political activity, he might really have been a hundred men not even bound up in one. By this, we mean that his energy in one department did not so interpenetrate and flavour his energy in others as to make one feel its individual origin and singleness of conception. There was rough force, extraordinary vitality, immense vigour of handling in all he did ; but the scientific mind never be- trayel itself in the statesman ; the judicial mind scarcely gleamed out in the biographer or historian ; the meta- physician was hardly seen in the lawyer ; nor even the popular leader in the constitutional theorist. Brougham was a big miscellany of useful forces, in which the modern doctrine of cor- relation,—the doctrine that any one form of force is absolutely in- terchangeable with every other,—could by no means be detected. 'True, the measure of his restless strength was nearly the same in every direction, but there was little trace of co- ordination and reciprocal influence among the various depart- ments of his wonderfully miscellaneous energy. Like a besom, his multitudinous intelligence was composed of an immense number of almost equally strong fibres, with which it was possible to sweep a great surface of ground greatly in need of such sweeping ; but the bond between these fibres seemed to be rather the comparatively mechanical one of a common sheath or socket in the same energetic character, than that perfect permeation of one faculty or acquirement by all the others which goes to make up what is called the highest -culture of accomplished men. He wrote freely and at large on education, history, biography, law, science, natural theology, every branch of politics ; he wrote on one branch of classical study, the oratory of Greece and Rome, with as much shrewd- ness and minuteness of treatment as he ever devoted to any sub- ject of study ; he published at least one anonymous romance ; and he spoke probably much more even than he wrote ; but while he never touched a subject in his earlier days without leaving the impression of force behind him, there is scarcely a single speech or writing of Lord Brougham's, except, perhaps, speeches of a purely professional character, like that on Queen Caroline, which would carry with it the sense of -completeness, exhaustiveness, perfection. Indeed, he might have sanely said of himself what the man in the Gospels said insanely,—that his name was Legion. Legion as a reformer in an age when almost everything is wrong, may be all the more useful for his multiplicity of inchoate energies ; and no group of men, even though com- bining Brougham's various powers, could have done so much to bring home to the public the manifoldness of the mischiefs under which England groaned, and of the remedies for which it craved, as the single reformer Brougham ; for his name was a thread which united in the popular imagination the various topics of which he treated. But such a one, though the best of all reformers to stir public indignation at the rank -crop of evils, is not the one best fitted to perfect the cure even of any ; and the movements which Brougham's hundred- handed genius started, it needed minds of a more limited but also more finely chiselled type to mature. Nothing impresses one more in the career of this wonderful man than that he never gained by age a single compensation for the loss of the force of youth. He lost in impetus without gaining in judgment. He lost in versatility without gaining in accu- Tau. He lost in fire without gaining in serenity. He lost in intensity without gaining in comprehensiveness. He lost in bitterness without gaining in suavity. Fnally, he lost in terror without gaining in command. The great advantage of age over youth is in the power it acquires of co-ordinating all its acquisitions, and turning variety of experience into moral wisdom. But Lord Brougham's huge and multitudinous energies seem to have been too hasty ever to have furnished his inner spirit with the materials for this large moral assimilation. As .his moral nature never gained that mild and venerable benignity which is so great a charm of old age, so his intellectual nature never gained the lucid and temperate power of impressive survey, which is its greatest privilege. The one often exists without the other, as, for example, in Brougham's great contemporary, Lord Lyndhurst, who had the last in all its splendour ; but Brougham displayed neither. His latest efforts in the annual addresses to the Social Science Association showed the mere flickering flame of former vigour, without a glimpse of any milder and larger wisdom. Here and there the old sarcasm flashed out. Here and there the old power of physically crushing, as with an almost mu:cilia?• compression of the will, would excite admiration for the old man's lingering might. But for the most part the vital energy had disappeared from the sentences, which trailed a slow length of words along, without any vestige of that great constricting force which once made up for their inordinate volume. While Brougham was engaged in the uphill struggle against blind and obdurate authority he was great, he was Titanic. When he had won his battle and presided over the execution of the policy for which he had fought, he was less than many an ordinary mortal. In denouncing and exposing the disorder he was almost superhuman. In restoring and expounding order he was not even distinguished. He had not the tran- quillity of nature requisite to organize and create. His mind reeked with the smoke and passion of battle.
How deep did the true Liberal spirit really reach in Lord Brougham's nature ? That he believed with all his mind, and soul, and strength, in the value of popular education, in the blessing of " diffusing useful knowledge ;" that he wished to make it really universal ; that he carried away from the Scotch University, in which his first intellectual impulses were moulded, something like a pure enthusiasm for the new sciences which were just then taking shape and opening a wide vista of discovery to the great mathematicians, chemists, aad electricians of the age, no one who knows Lord Brougham's " Lives of the Literary Men of George III.'s time" can doubt for an instant. There is, to our minds, nothing in all Lord_ Brougham's voluminous and fatiguing compositions half so noble and touching as the passage in which he recalls, with a sort of passion of tenderness, his old boyish delight in Dr. Black's lectures on chemistry, especially the lecture in which the venerable professor used to rehearse the great discovery of his youth as to " fixed air,"—the combinations, namely, into which air could enter with solid substances. Lord Brougham's style, usually so wanting in grace, and delicacy, and serenity, and transparency, attracts to itself almost all those qualities as he delineates the rekindled enthusiasm of the lonely, gentle, old man, with his neat-handed experiments and his scientific relics, — the carefully preserved instruments of his great scientific triumph, — going back to the first moment in which a new chemical truth had flashed itself upon his mind. Lord Brougham says, and we imagine truly, that there was no recollection of his life towards which he yearned more often and more ardently than to that first love of science which was most closely associated with Black's lecture-room. And though he had not himself either the patience or the peace of the scientific mind, though he was formed for the heat of battle, it is quite certain that he loved all knowledge and science, and that he believed to the bottom of his soul in the duty of diffusing it through the whole people. So far at least he was a lover of light and a true Liberal. Whether we can honestly say that he was in the same profound sense a lover of liberty, we feel the gravest doubt. He fought early, and passionately, of course, against exclusion of all kinds. He denounced slavery with all his force. He assailed religious bigotry with immense power. But it is one thing for a young man to become the spokesman
of the rising popular feeling, and to fling himself with eager- ness and delight into the thick of a battle which lie feels in every
nerve must be, before long, the winning side, and another to entertain that deep love for the principles involved which will keep him true to them through ill report as well as good, when his old friends are deserting him. We do not believe that Lord Brougham had this sort of love of liberty, nor even that he understood how essential a condition of greatness of cha- racter moral liberty,—of which political liberty is the natural condition,—is. He certainly joined the hue and cry in favour of the Southern Slave States in his old age ; and denounced the conduct of the greatest struggle of our days by the greatest man of our days, with a flash of his old arrogance and malevolence. And in his bitter and sincere opposition to religious intolerance he seems to have been animated less by a deep reverence for religion, than by the lawyer's and man of the world's in- difference to it. Intellectually, Lord Brougham was a true Liberal. Morally and politically he was no more than a true !hater of restrictions of which he did not see the use. Lord Brougham's great political weapon, the spear which was " like a weaver's beam " with which he terrified the armies he opposed and overcame, was his wonderful power of hatred, and his subtlety of expression whenever he could allow hatred its full swing. He had a new power of language whenever this impulse came into action. To take a very small instance, he calls some one, in his anonymous novel Albert Lunel—in which almost all the characters are French disguises of his own English contemporaries,—" a compound, or rather a compost, of affectations, selfishness, and false sen- timent." What can be more effective than the substitution there of the word "compost" for "compound,"—just conveying the impression of thick and sticky pommade ? But to get a measure of the full power of Brougham's language take any of his diatribes against George IV.,—this, for instance, in that sketch of him which he inserted among his " Statesmen of the reign of George III." He had been describing George's treat- ment of his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, during the first year of their marriage. At the end of it "the first gentleman of his age' was pleased under his own hand to intimate that it suited his disposition no longer to maintain even the thin covering of decency which he had hitherto suffered to veil the terms of their union ; he announced that they should now live apart ; and added, with a refinement of delicacy suited to the finished accom- plishment of his pre-eminence among gentlemen, that he pledged him- self never to ask for a nearer connection, even if their only child should die; he added, with a moving piety, which God forbid !' in case it night be imagined that the death of the daughter was as much his hope as the destruction of the mother. The separation thus delicately affected made only an apparent change in the relative position of the parties. They had before occupied the same house, because they had lived under one roof, but in a state of complete separation ; and now the only difference was that, instead of making a partition of the dwelling, and assigning her one-half of its interior, he was graciously pleased to make a new division of the same mansion, giving her the outside, and keeping the inside to his mistresses and himself."
In the two sentences we have italicized, at all events in the first of them, Brougham's ferocity of contempt blazes out in its full power. Sometimes, we think it a little overreaches itself in grasping after new forms of reiteration, and we fancy that in the latter of these sentences there is a flavour of ex- travagance which rather injures the intensity. Vanity, which was terribly strong in Brougham,—perhaps as strong as any hate,—now and then weakened the intellectual expression of that hate. He makes his hero in Albert Lunel pray in an agony of fear, " for omniscience and omnipresence," that he may know what people are saying of him. We should imagine that the idea had actually suggested itself to his own mind, but that the fear was not fear of the kind which he imputes to his hero. Lord Brougham's immense power of attack may have been at times fed by his vanity. It was certainly, at times, greatly weakened,—rendered artificial and theatrical by the intensity of desire to kindle new admiration for his own power, —as, for instance, when he knelt theatrically to the House of Lords to pass the Reform Bill.
Lord Brougham has left us a character of himself under the thin disguise of the Baron de Moulin, which illustrates this one of his defects, while exaggerating, we think, others of them, and it is so curious that we will extract it here. The cha- racter is introduced with a discussion of the Baron's attentions to a great beauty, the wife of another :—
" But how did she and he go on? I suppose she relished him ? '
As who does not? His various learning ; his brilliant wit ; his drollery, for it now soars to the Attic heights and now sweeps the Doric levels ; his grave, serious, even severe, though God wot never ascetic moments ; his liveliness, alternating with sarcasm, like the clouds which course along the sky, now hiding and now revealing the sun, now screening us from his glare, and now descending in tempests of thunder —all this must have made a strongish impression on a very clever woman, though he has absolutely none of the qualities which win the ordinary female mind; he is plain, nay, as near being ugly as any in- telligent countenance will allow ; he sings not, plays not, paints not, dances not ; he neither hunts, nor hawks, nor shoots; he gambles not ; and he dresses so that, were he to appear in our salons at Paris, he must either serve a long noviciate, or attain high station, or make some happy hit that all can talk about—else success he never could have ; add to all which, manners, though high enough bred, yet abrupt, a temper not under strict control, and as much pride as falls to one man's share.'—'Is he amiable in other respects ? ' asked Lord Moreton; 'for somehow he holds himself so much aloof, that the more one sees of him the less one knows of him.'—'Amiable it is quite impossible any one can be with his hot temper, and the sin raging in him without control whereby our first parents fell. But he is also revengeful, and I should say could forgive more easily than he can forget.'—' Do you hold him selfish ?'— ' In the utmost sense of the word. I don't mean to say he is incapable of generosity ; he is of course generous, because he is proud, and cannot stoop to reckon pounds, shillings, and pence (Louis et livres). He is munificent by force of being magnificent, would give to deserving objects rather than to others, but must give to some, that he may be above counting cost, and also make men feel grateful and dependent. But I think he despises, perhaps hates, all he confers favours upon.' "
The exaggerated vanity of the first part of this description,. which certainly overrates Brougham's social qualities, is again quite as evident in the exaggerated description of his pride and contempt for dependents, at its close. Lord. Brougham evidently piqued himself on the romantic rugged- ness of his own character, and forgot the most unromantic of all personal characteristics, vanity, in this Salvator-Rosa-like- sketch of himself.
How curious and striking is the contrast between the genius• of the two men who alone in this century have risen from the lowest to the highest point of political fame by the unaided force of their„,,own talents and ambition,—Brougham and Disraeli. We should say that the great force of the- one lay in his intellectual carnality,—if we may use the expres- sion,--the absolute fusion of his passions and his intelligence, —the stimulus which ambition gave to thought, vanity to knowledge, contempt to savoir-faire, anger to insight, vindic tiveness to reason,—so that his enemies often regarded him- much as Demosthenes, with that exquisite acrimony which- Brougham himself so keenly appreciated, regarded .lschines, as a sort of political disease certain to break out afresh when- ever any new malady weakened the nation's constitution. Mr.. Disraeli, on the other hand, has risen to the top by the perfect " detachment " of his intellect from all personal passions, by his wonderful power of watching, from a position quite out- side his own desires, what he can best do to forward them, and striking in, either without or with the appearance of resent- ment, as best suits his purpose, in the coolest spirit of general- ship. But Brougham has at least one advantage over his still more successful contemporary. On Mr. Disraeli's fall we unfortu- nately cannot as yet philosophize ; but we do know that he- rose by casting out the little ballast of principle which he may possibly—we speak on mere hypothesis—at one time have possessed. Brougham's rise, on the contrary, was not due to any dereliction of principle, but was finally barred by his. defects. He rose by the vehenience of his best sympathies ; he fell by the outbreak of his worst frailties. He at least earned his success,—if he also earned the failure of his latter - days.
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