(July 1841)
_The Opinions of Lord Holland, as recorded in the journals of the House
of Lords from 1797 to 1841. Collected and edited by D. C. MOYLAN, of
Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister-at-law. 8vo. London: 1841._
MANY reasons make it impossible for us to lay before our readers, at the
present moment, a complete view of the character and public career of
the late Lord Holland. But we feel that we have already deferred too
long the duty of paying some tribute to his memory. We feel that it
is more becoming to bring without further delay an offering, though
intrinsically of little value, than to leave his tomb longer without
some token of our reverence and love.
We shall say very little of the book which lies on our table. And yet
it is a book which, even if it had been the work of a less distinguished
man, or had appeared under circumstances less interesting, would have
well repaid an attentive perusal. It is valuable, both as a record of
principles and as a model of composition. We find in it all the great
maxims which, during more than forty years, guided Lord Holland’s public
conduct, and the chief reasons on which those maxims rest, condensed
into the smallest possible space, and set forth with admirable
perspicuity, dignity, and precision. To his opinions on Foreign Policy
we for the most part cordially assent; but now and then we are inclined
to think them imprudently generous. We could not have signed the protest
against the detention of Napoleon. The Protest respecting the course
which England pursued at the Congress of Verona, though it contains much
that is excellent, contains also positions which, we are inclined
to think, Lord Holland would, at a later period, have admitted to be
unsound. But to all his doctrines on constitutional questions, we give
our hearty approbation; and we firmly believe that no British Government
has ever deviated from that line of internal policy which he has traced,
without detriment to the public.
We will give, as a specimen of this little volume, a single passage, in
which a chief article of the political creed of the Whigs is stated and
explained, with singular clearness, force, and brevity. Our readers
will remember that, in 1825, the Catholic Association raised the cry of
emancipation with most formidable effect. The Tories acted after their
kind. Instead of removing the grievance they tried to put down the
agitation, and brought in a law, apparently sharp and stringent, but
in truth utterly impotent, for restraining the right of petition. Lord
Holland’s Protest on that occasion is excellent:
“We are,” says he, “well aware that the privileges of the people, the
rights of free discussion, and the spirit and letter of our popular
institutions, must render,--and they are intended to render,--the
continuance of an extensive grievance and of the dissatisfaction
consequent thereupon, dangerous to the tranquillity of the country,
and ultimately subversive of the authority of the State. Experience and
theory alike forbid us to deny that effect of a free constitution; a
sense of justice and a love of liberty equally deter us from lamenting
it. But we have always been taught to look for the remedy of such
disorders in the redress of the grievances which justify them, and
in the removal of the dissatisfaction from which they flow--not in
restraints on ancient privileges, not in inroads on the right of public
discussion, nor in violations of the principles of a free government.
If, therefore, the legal method of seeking redress, which has been
resorted to by persons labouring under grievous disabilities, be
fraught with immediate or remote danger to the State, we draw from
that circumstance a conclusion long since foretold by great
authority--namely, that the British constitution, and large exclusions,
cannot subsist together; that the constitution must destroy them, or
they will destroy the constitution.”
It was not, however, of this little book, valuable and interesting as it
is, but of the author, that we meant to speak; and we will try to do so
with calmness and impartiality.
In order to fully appreciate the character of Lord Holland, it is
necessary to go far back into the history of his family; for he had
inherited something more than a coronet and an estate. To the House of
which he was the head belongs one distinction which we believe to be
without a parallel in our annals. During more than a century, there has
never been a time at which a Fox has not stood in a prominent station
among public men. Scarcely had the chequered career of the first
Lord Holland closed, when his son, Charles, rose to the head of the
Opposition, and to the first rank among English debaters. And before
Charles was borne to Westminster Abbey a third Fox had already become
one of the most conspicuous politicians in the kingdom.
It is impossible not to be struck by the strong family likeness which,
in spite of diversities arising from education and position, appears in
these three distinguished persons. In their faces and figures there was
a resemblance, such as is common enough in novels, where one picture is
good for ten generations, but such as in real life is seldom found. The
ample person, the massy and thoughtful forehead, the large eyebrows, the
full cheek and lip, the expression, so singularly compounded of sense,
humour, courage, openness, a strong will and a sweet temper, were common
to all. But the features of the founder of the House, as the pencil of
Reynolds and the chisel of Nollekens have handed them down to us, were
disagreeably harsh and exaggerated. In his descendants, the aspect was
preserved, but it was softened, till it became, in the late lord, the
most gracious and interesting countenance that was ever lighted up by
the mingled lustre of intelligence and benevolence.
As it was with the faces of the men of this noble family, so was it also
with their minds. Nature had done much for them all. She had moulded
them all of that clay of which she is most sparing. To all she had
given strong reason and sharp wit, a quick relish for every physical and
intellectual enjoyment, constitutional intrepidity, and that frankness
by which constitutional intrepidity is generally accompanied, spirits
which nothing could depress, tempers easy, generous, and placable,
and that genial courtesy which has its seat in the heart, and of
which artificial politeness is only a faint and cold imitation. Such
a disposition is the richest inheritance that ever was entailed on any
family.
But training and situation greatly modified the fine qualities which
nature lavished with such profusion on three generations of the house of
Fox. The first Lord Holland was a needy political adventurer. He entered
public life at a time when the standard of integrity among statesmen was
low. He started as the adherent of a minister who had indeed many titles
to respect, who possessed eminent talents both for administration and
for debate, who understood the public interest well, and who meant
fairly by the country, but who had seen so much perfidy and meanness
that he had become sceptical as to the existence of probity. Weary
of the cant of patriotism, Walpole had learned to talk a cant of a
different kind. Disgusted by that sort of hypocrisy which is at least
a homage to virtue, he was too much in the habit of practising the less
respectable hypocrisy which ostentatiously displays, and sometimes
even simulates vice. To Walpole Fox attached himself, politically and
personally, with the ardour which belonged to his temperament. And it
is not to be denied that in the school of Walpole he contracted faults
which destroyed the value of his many great endowments. He raised
himself, indeed, to the first consideration in the House of Commons; he
became a consummate master of the art of debate; he attained honours and
immense wealth; but the public esteem and confidence were withheld from
him. His private friends, indeed, justly extolled his generosity and
good nature. They maintained that in those parts of his conduct which
they could least defend there was nothing sordid, and that, if he was
misled, he was misled by amiable feelings, by a desire to serve his
friends, and by anxious tenderness for his children. But by the nation
he was regarded as a man of insatiable rapacity and desperate ambition;
as a man ready to adopt, without scruple, the most immoral and the most
unconstitutional manners; as a man perfectly fitted, by all his opinions
and feelings, for the work of managing the Parliament by means of
secret-service money, and of keeping down the people with the bayonet.
Many of his contemporaries had a morality quite as lax as his: but very
few among them had his talents, and none had his hardihood and energy.
He could not, like Sandys and Doddington, find safety in contempt. He
therefore became an object of such general aversion as no statesman
since the fall of Strafford has incurred, of such general aversion
as was probably never in any country incurred by a man of so kind and
cordial a disposition. A weak mind would have sunk under such a load
of unpopularity. But that resolute spirit seemed to derive new firmness
from the public hatred. The only effect which reproaches appeared to
produce on him, was to sour, in some degree, his naturally sweet temper.
The last acts of his public life were marked, not only by that audacity
which he had derived from nature, not only by that immorality which he
had learned in the school of Walpole, but by a harshness which almost
amounted to cruelty, and which had never been supposed to belong to his
character. His severity increased the unpopularity from which it had
sprung. The well-known lampoon of Gray may serve as a specimen of
the feeling of the country. All the images are taken from shipwrecks,
quicksands, and cormorants. Lord Holland is represented as complaining,
that the cowardice of his accomplices had prevented him from putting
down the free spirit of the city of London by sword and fire, and
as pining for the time when birds of prey should make their nests in
Westminster Abbey, and unclean beasts burrow in St. Paul’s.
Within a few months after the death of this remarkable man, his second
son Charles appeared at the head of the party opposed to the American
War. Charles had inherited the bodily and mental constitution of his
father, and had been much, far too much, under his father’s influence.
It was indeed impossible that a son of so affectionate and noble a
nature should not have been warmly attached to a parent who possessed
many fine qualities, and who carried his indulgence and liberality
towards his children even to a culpable extent. Charles saw that the
person to whom he was bound by the strongest ties was, in the highest
degree, odious to the nation; and the effect was what might have been
expected from the strong passions and constitutional boldness of so
high-spirited a youth. He cast in his lot with his father, and took,
while still a boy, a deep part in the most unjustifiable and unpopular
measures that had been adopted since the reign of James the Second. In
the debates on the Middlesex Election, he distinguished himself, not
only by his precocious powers of eloquence, but by the vehement and
scornful manner in which he bade defiance to public opinion. He was at
that time regarded as a man likely to be the most formidable champion
of arbitrary government that had appeared since the Revolution, to be
a Bute with far greater powers, a Mansfield with far greater courage.
Happily his father’s death liberated him early from the pernicious
influence by which he had been misled. His mind expanded. His range of
observation became wider. His genius broke through early prejudices. His
natural benevolence and magnanimity had fair play. In a very short time
he appeared in a situation worthy of his understanding and of his heart.
From a family whose name was associated in the public mind with tyranny
and corruption, from a party of which the theory and the practice
were equally servile, from the midst of the Luttrells, the Dysons, the
Barringtons, came forth the greatest parliamentary defender of civil and
religious liberty.
The late Lord Holland succeeded to the talents and to the fine natural
dispositions of his House. But his situation was very different from
that of the two eminent men of whom we have spoken. In some important
respects it was better, in some it was worse than theirs. He had one
great advantage over them. He received a good political education. The
first lord was educated by Sir Robert Walpole. Mr. Fox was educated by
his father. The late lord was educated by Mr. Fox. The pernicious maxims
early imbibed by the first Lord Holland, made his great talents useless
and worse than useless to the State. The pernicious maxims early imbibed
by Mr. Fox, led him, at the commencement of his public life, into great
faults which, though afterwards nobly expiated, were never forgotten. To
the very end of his career, small men, when they had nothing else to say
in defence of their own tyranny, bigotry, and imbecility, could always
raise a cheer by some paltry taunt about the election of Colonel
Luttrell, the imprisonment of the lord mayor, and other measures in
which the great Whig leader had borne a part at the age of one or two
and twenty. On Lord Holland no such slur could be thrown. Those who
most dissent from his opinions must acknowledge that a public life more
consistent is not to be found in our annals. Every part of it is in
perfect harmony with every other part; and the whole is in perfect
harmony with the great principles of toleration and civil freedom. This
rare felicity is in a great measure to be attributed to the influence
of Mr. Fox. Lord Holland, as was natural in a person of his talents and
expectations, began at a very early age to take the keenest interest in
politics; and Mr. Fox found the greatest pleasure in forming the mind of
so hopeful a pupil. They corresponded largely on political subjects
when the young lord was only sixteen; and their friendship and mutual
confidence continued to the day of that mournful separation at Chiswick.
Under such training such a man as Lord Holland was in no danger of
falling into those faults which threw a dark shade over the whole career
of his grandfather, and from which the youth of his uncle was not wholly
free.
On the other hand, the late Lord Holland, as compared with his
grandfather and his uncle, laboured under one great disadvantage. They
were members of the House of Commons. He became a Peer while still an
infant. When he entered public life, the House of Lords was a very small
and a very decorous assembly. The minority to which he belonged was
scarcely able to muster five or six votes on the most important nights,
when eighty or ninety lords were present. Debate had accordingly become
a mere form, as it was in the Irish House of Peers before the Union.
This was a great misfortune to a man like Lord Holland. It was not by
occasionally addressing fifteen or twenty solemn and unfriendly
auditors that his grandfather and his uncle attained their unrivalled
parliamentary skill. The former had learned his art in “the great
Walpolean battles,” on nights when Onslow was in the chair seventeen
hours without intermission, when the thick ranks on both sides kept
unbroken order till long after the winter sun had risen upon them, when
the blind were led out by the hand into the lobby and the paralytic
laid down in their bed-clothes on the benches. The powers of Charles
Fox were, from the first, exercised in conflicts not less exciting. The
great talents of the late Lord Holland had no such advantage. This was
the more unfortunate, because the peculiar species of eloquence which
belonged to him in common with his family required much practice to
develop it. With strong sense, and the greatest readiness of wit, a
certain tendency to hesitation was hereditary in the line of Fox. This
hesitation arose, not from the poverty, but from the wealth of their
vocabulary. They paused, not from the difficulty of finding one
expression, but from the difficulty of choosing between several. It was
only by slow degrees and constant exercise that the first Lord Holland
and his son overcame the defect. Indeed neither of them overcame it
completely.
In statement, the late Lord Holland was not successful; his chief
excellence lay in reply. He had the quick eye of his house for the
unsound parts of an argument, and a great felicity in exposing them. He
was decidedly more distinguished in debate than any peer of his time
who had not sat in the House of Commons. Nay, to find his equal among
persons similarly situated, we must go back eighty years to Earl
Granville. For Mansfield, Thurlow, Loughborough, Grey, Grenville,
Brougham, Plunkett, and other eminent men, living and dead, whom we will
not stop to enumerate, carried to the Upper House an eloquence formed
and matured in the Lower. The opinion of the most discerning judges
was that Lord Holland’s oratorical performances, though sometimes most
successful, afforded no fair measure of his oratorical powers, and that,
in an assembly of which the debates were frequent and animated, he
would have attained a very high order of excellence. It was, indeed,
impossible to listen to his conversation without seeing that he was
born a debater. To him, as to his uncle, the exercise of the mind in
discussion was a positive pleasure. With the greatest good nature
and good breeding, he was the very opposite to an assenter. The word
“disputatious” is generally used as a word of reproach; but we
can express our meaning only by saying that Lord Holland was most
courteously and pleasantly disputatious. In truth, his quickness in
discovering and apprehending distinctions and analogies was such as a
veteran judge might envy. The lawyers of the Duchy of Lancaster were
astonished to find in an unprofessional man so strong a relish for the
esoteric parts of their science, and complained that as soon as they
had split a hair, Lord Holland proceeded to split the filaments into
filaments still finer. In a mind less happily constituted, there might
have been a risk that this turn for subtilty would have produced serious
evil. But in the heart and understanding of Lord Holland there was ample
security against all such danger. He was not a man to be the dupe of
his own ingenuity. He put his logic to its proper use; and in him the
dialectician was always subordinate to the statesman.
His political life is written in the chronicles of his country. Perhaps,
as we have already intimated, his opinions on two or three great
questions of foreign policy were open to just objection. Yet even his
errors, if he erred, were amiable and respectable. We are not sure
that we do not love and admire him the more because he was now and
then seduced from what we regard as a wise policy by sympathy with
the oppressed, by generosity towards the fallen, by a philanthropy so
enlarged that it took in all nations, by love of peace, a love which
in him was second only to the love of freedom, and by the magnanimous
credulity of a mind which was as incapable of suspecting as of devising
mischief.
To his views on questions of domestic policy the voice of his countrymen
does ample justice. They revere the memory of the man who was,
during forty years, the constant protector of all oppressed races
and persecuted sects, of the man whom neither the prejudices nor the
interests belonging to his station could seduce from the path of
right, of the noble, who in every great crisis cast in his lot with the
commons, of the planter, who made manful war on the slave-trade of the
landowner, whose whole heart was in the struggle against the corn-laws.
We have hitherto touched almost exclusively on those parts of Lord
Holland’s character which were open to the observation of millions.
How shall we express the feelings with which his memory is cherished by
those who were honoured with his friendship? Or in what language shall
we speak of that house, once celebrated for its rare attractions to the
furthest ends of the civilised world, and now silent and desolate as the
grave? To that house, a hundred and twenty years ago, a poet addressed
those tender and graceful lines, which have now acquired a new meaning
not less sad than that which they originally bore:
“Thou hill, whose brow the antique structures grace, Reared by bold
chiefs of Warwick’s noble race, Why, once so loved, whene’er thy bower
appears, O’er my dim eyeballs glance the sudden tears? How sweet were
once thy prospects fresh and fair, Thy sloping walks and unpolluted air!
How sweet the glooms beneath thine aged trees, Thy noon-tide shadow and
thine evening breeze His image thy forsaken bowers restore; Thy walks
and airy prospects charm no more No more the summer in thy glooms
allayed, Thine evening breezes, and thy noon-day shade.”
Yet a few years, and the shades and structures may follow their
illustrious masters. The wonderful city which, ancient and gigantic as
it is, still continues to grow as fast as a young town of logwood by a
water-privilege in Michigan, may soon displace those turrets and gardens
which are associated with so much that is interesting and noble, with
the courtly magnificence of Rich with the loves of Ormond, with the
counsels of Cromwell, with the death of Addison. The time is coming
when, perhaps, a few old men, the last survivors of our generation, will
in vain seek, amidst new streets, and squares, and railway stations, for
the site of that dwelling which was in their youth the favourite resort
of wits and beauties, of painters and poets, of scholars, philosophers,
and statesmen. They will then remember, with strange tenderness, many
objects once familiar to them, the avenue and the terrace, the busts and
the paintings, the carving, the grotesque gilding, and the enigmatical
mottoes. With peculiar fondness they will recall that venerable chamber,
in which all the antique gravity of a college library was so singularly
blended with all that female grace and wit could devise to embellish
a drawing-room. They will recollect, not unmoved, those shelves
loaded with the varied learning of many lands and many ages, and those
portraits in which were preserved the features of the best and wisest
Englishmen of two generations. They will recollect how many men who have
guided the politics of Europe, who have moved great assemblies by reason
and eloquence, who have put life into bronze and canvas, or who have
left to posterity things so written as it shall not willingly let them
die, were there mixed with all that was loveliest and gayest in the
society of the most splendid of capitals. They will remember the
peculiar character which belonged to that circle, in which every talent
and accomplishment, every art and science, had its place. They will
remember how the last debate was discussed in one corner, and the last
comedy of Scribe in another; while Wilkie gazed with modest admiration
on Sir Joshua’s Baretti; while Mackintosh turned over Thomas Aquinas
to verify a quotation; while Talleyrand related his conversations with
Barras at the Luxembourg, or his ride with Lannes over the field of
Austerlitz. They will remember, above all, the grace, and the kindness,
far more admirable than grace, with which the princely hospitality of
that ancient mansion was dispensed. They will remember the venerable
and benignant countenance and the cordial voice of him who bade
them welcome. They will remember that temper which years of pain, of
sickness, of lameness, of confinement, seemed only to make sweeter
and sweeter, and that frank politeness, which at once relieved all the
embarrassment of the youngest and most timid writer or artist, who
found himself for the first time among Ambassadors and Earls. They will
remember that constant flow of conversation, so natural, so animated,
so various, so rich with observation and anecdote; that wit which
never gave a wound; that exquisite mimicry which ennobled, instead
of degrading; that goodness of heart which appeared in every look and
accent, and gave additional value to every talent and acquirement. They
will remember, too, that he whose name they hold in reverence was
not less distinguished by the inflexible uprightness of his political
conduct than by his loving disposition and his winning manners. They
will remember that, in the last lines which he traced, he expressed his
joy that he had done nothing unworthy of the friend of Fox and Grey; and
they will have reason to feel similar joy, if, in looking back on many
troubled years, they cannot accuse themselves of having done anything
unworthy of men who were distinguished by the friendship of Lord
Holland.