LORD BROUGHAM.
OR]) BROUGHAM in his eighty-sixth year discoursing at York on almost all things human, and moderating the discussions of acute men who have given much time and thought to special subjects, is a spectacle at which all Eng- land, always full of admiration for the pluck of aged men, is naturally delighted. Nor is the satisfaction probably diminished by the obscure feeling that Lord Brougham is in many respects the impersonation on a great scale of the eager, restless, ambitious, half-successful intelligence of the rising middle class of England in the nineteenth century. We say "half-successful," for great as have been the worldly successes—the political and social achievements of Lord Brougham, it is of the very essence of that character which he represents to rest in no achieved result, never to enjoy the placid intellectual serenity and wide horizon of old age, never to sink back, even intellectually, on the calm of a highly disciplined judgment, but to grasp hastily to the very last at every opportunity of putting knowledge to ambitious uses, and making it subserve social ends. We are not now speaking of any moral characteristics in the rest- less intellect of Lord _Brougham, but simply of that undigni- fied absence of fitting repose there is in it, of that want of the enjoyment of luminous thought for its own sake, that uneasy fretting and fuming of acute intelligence which pro- claims that its end is less truth than some kind of power. There was a striking contrast to Lord Brougham in this respect in one to whom Lord Brougham paid the other day a somewhat inflated tribute, and who cannot in any way be regarded as morally Lord Brougham's superior. Lord Lyndhurst rose from precisely the same class, and made, ap- parently at least, a less scrupulous use of his very great powers than Lord Brougham. Yet intellectually he did not represent in any way the same type. His was the calm luminous judgment which rested quietly, almost like Goethe's, in the lucidity and maturity of its own thoughts. His latest speeches were remarkable for their light, their breadth, their thoroughness of intellectual penetration. They seemed the ripe fruit of a placid judgment that had no interest in expressing any thought before it was spread clear and keenly before his mind. Lord Brougham, in the energy of his desire to pay a " tribute " to Lord Lyndhurst, invoked him in a quotation which, by the rawness of its eloquence and strange unfitness for its purpose, would probably have annoyed Lord Lyndhurst more than the tribute would have gratified him, — and which certainly marked the wide gulf between Lord Brougham's eager, vigorous, acquisitive, but showy and superficial intelligence, and his contemporary's wide, calm intellect.
"Soul of the past ! companion of the dead ! Where is thy home, and whither art thou fled? Back to its heavenly source thy being goes Swift as the comet wheels to where he rose. Faith lured thine eye to deathless hope sublime, Beyond the realms of nature and of time."
Is it possible to conceive lines which the cold and lucid' lawyer would have felt more utterly inappropriate to his own worldly sagacity and clear, tranquil self-interest? If either- of the two were cemetery it is certainly the irregular, dis- persed, disorganized, heady, straggling genius of Brougham,. with his brilliant tail of popular following;—bat Lord Lynd- hurst, could he have pronounced Lord Brougham's epitaph, would certainly have found something expressing a more pre- cise idea than this versified rhodornontade. We purposely choose the comparison in intellect with Lord Lyndhurst because we do not admire Lord Lyndhurst's career. Lord Brougham's ambition has been far more useful to the- world than Lord Lyndhurst's. But the type of mere in- tellect in the latter was much the higher of the two. It was not of the kind which snatched so eagerly at useful knowledge for the sake of its applications ; it rested far more tranquilly in the pleasure of lucid insight. It would.. have been simply impossible for Lord Lyndhurst to produce the- many vigorous, various, often useful, always incomplete and am- bitious, intellectual efforts which have dotted so thickly Lord Brougham's career, and have degenerated lately into the omnium gatherum addresses—whose only merit it is to picture- pretty accurately the loose half-knowledge and slipshod judg- ment of our busy nineteenth century on all conceivable sub- jects—with which he now annually introduces social science- to our notice. The true difference between the two intellects. is that while Lord Lyndhurst's intellect subserved his own private purposes directly, Lord Brougham's often subserved the public interest through his huge appetite for popularity —and the latter process curiously enough disturbs and deranges the mere intellect even more than the coldest self- interest. A. great lover of popularity gets accustomed to. the restless and partly theatric habit of looking at everything with a thousand eyes besides his own; but cold and passionless. self-interest finds its account in facing the absolute truth, so far as it can arrive at it, privately, whatever suppression it- may find it desirable to make in public. Lord Brougham has with great justice been called Argus-eyed; but though many eyes are useful to an orator, it is scarcely a compliment to his intellect. The many-eyed creatures, mythical or actual, get many glimpses of the world from before and from behind_ which others do not get, but after all this must confuse their conceptions of the universe if they have any. Intellect is. homogeneous and single, though it may make use of many channels of apprehension ; Lord Brougham never seems to take a central intellectual survey of his subjects. His mind is a tangle of strong popular middle-class views. There have been few judges so able whose minds were so- far from judicial as Lord Brougham. Compare only his view of the American war even with Mr. Disraeli's, whose mind, though not judicial is at least perfectly passionless and in- competent to sympathize with prejudices however popular.. Mr. Disraeli betrays no sympathy with either side, but. in some sense enters into both. The causes, he says, are deep, such causes as have always produced long struggles,— the emancipation of a race, the maintenance of an empire, the struggle for a nationality ; and such causes bring complications and knots which seem to require cutting by physical force. They cannot, they are not intended to be, loosed. It is the sort of crisis, said Mr. Disraeli, when a passionate conflict is inevitable ; and when perhaps almost the best issue for smouldering hostilities is an open flame. Turn from this,— no doubt an insufficient and colourless, but still so fur as it goes a true view of the war,—to Lord Brougham's few sen- tences, the only forcible ones in his address,—of almost vicious hatred for the North,—sentences in which all the concentrated irritation, prejudice, and injured self-interest of the popular English middle-class feeling get a ferocious expression :— " And now what a scene of misery and of crime does their recent history and present condition present to the friends of social science, more horrid than any case known in modern, let us say Christian times ! and with this sad peculiarity, that the whole- people, instead of merely permitting, as in other cases, the crimes of their rulers, are themselves the active and willing agents in the work of merciless slaughter—of such wholesale bloodshed as never before disgraced the name of man. Qute est fate tam infesta ira, quam per ducts cedes fusus sanguis explere non potuerit ? Adde hue popula- tionem agrorum,incendia villarum ac minas, amnia ferro ignique vas- take. Biscene ira expleri non potuit ? (Liv. vii., 30.) How the blame for the three horrors should be distributed it boots not to inquire. Some good men have been deceived by the notion that slavery is the cause of the war—duped by the pretext that the North fights to free the slave, whereas their emancipation edict was a mere belligerent measure, and an afterthought; they (as Bishop Wilber- force said) oaring no more for the freedom of the black than they do for that of the white. But it had been reserved for the later act of the tragedy to see that Government, when destitute of other troops, drive herds of the unhappy negroes to slaughter, with no more remorse than sportsmen feel in clearing a preserve."
That is more like the. ability, the temper—the intellectual vice—with which Lord Brougham in the old days—in 1835— lashed out against the Government that had dispensed with him than anything he has said for years ; and yet the temper it expresses is only the reaction of the popular ill-feeling on a mind able to place a more than usually vigorous sting,—in- deed leas a sting than a torpedo shock—at the disposal of all who excite his antipathies.
However, this last characteristic is Lord Brougham's greatest power, by which his oratory will be remembered long after his discourses on 'the objects, advantages, and pleasure of science,' on natural theology, on the education of the people, and on all the other articles in that popular cycloptedia of a mind, are forgotten. Nowhere in any orator ancient or modern is there the same force of stroke against an adversary. However little his argument may convince ; his blow for the moment stuns and takes away the breath. There is nothing in all his writings so striking as the suppressed wrath in some of his speeches,—for example, the Liverpool speech in 1835, in which he sums :up the modifications to which his ministerial life had exposed him :— " If it were not somewhat late in the day for moralizing, I could tell of the prerogatives, not so very high,—the enjoyments, none of the sweetest,—which he loses who surrenders place, oftentimes misnamed power. To be responsible for measures which others control, perchance contrive ; to be chargeable with leaving undone things which he ought to have done, and had all the desire to do, without the power of doing; to be compelled to trust those whom he knew to be utterly untrustworthy ; and on the most momentous occasions involving the interests of millions, implicitly to cbnfide in quarters where common prudence forbade reposing a common confidence ; to have schemes of the wisest, the most profound policy, judged and decided on by the most ignorant and the most frivolous of human beings, and the most generous aspirations of the heart for the happiness of his species chilled by frowns of the most selfish and sordid of his race,—these are among the unenviable prerogatives of place,—of what is falsely called power in this country ; and yet I doubt if there be not others less enviable still. To be planted upon the eminence from whence he must see the baser features of human nature, uncovered and deformed ; witness the attitude of climbing ambition from a point whence it is only viewed as creeping and crawling, tortuous and venomous, in its hateful path ; be forced to see the hideous sight of a naked human heart, whether throbbing in the bosom of the great vulgar, or of the little, is not a very pleasing occupation for any one who loves his fellow-creatures, and would fain esteem them ; and, trust me, that he who wields power and patronage for but a little month, shall find the many he may try to serve furiously hating him for involuntary failure—while the few whom he may succeed in help- ing to the object of all their wishes shall, with a preposterous pride (the most unamiable part of the British character), seek to prove their independence by showing their ingratitude, if they do not try to cancel the obligation by fastening a quarrel upon him."
That strikes us as one of the most powerful series of intellec- tual shocks in the English language—shocks distributed in all directions at persons, partly invisible indeed to the audience, but whom the blows were certain to find. Lord Brougham's philanthropy has been useful enough, but founded chiefly, we think, on a love of popularity. He was never known to stem ther onset of an unjust popular opinion. As a battering- ram for obsolete evils and Conservative selfishness, his energy has in its time been magnificently useful; now, when the popular opinion be serves is itself full of narrow intoler- ance, as in the case of the American war, it is scarcely a pleasant sight to see the " ancient vigour once his pride and boast" return into him for a moment just that he may give a righteous cause,—and that cause his own forty years ago,—and a people fast rising into a higher sense of national duty, one of those stinging blows which, especially when undeserved, rouse the passions of nations,—and deeper passions than all the social science in the world can soothe. One of those raw quotations of his address which show how little Lord Brougham knows poetry from rhyme ended with the sentiment, "And peace, oh virtue ! peace is all thine own !" Whether peace belongs to virtue or not,—a question we do not understand,—it certainly does not belong to Lord Brougham. He inculcates it on the North by a furious box on the ear. Even if it improved their morals and made them more virtuous, it must do so by stinging them first into a fiercer resentment. An aged philanthropist of eighty-six, might, we should think, have used his large influence better.
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