(though some Houses are much better than others), many capable
lawyers, capable men of business, capable country gentlemen; many men
able to express themselves with clearness, fluency, and that sort of
temperate good sense which Englishmen especially value. Few,
however, were able to produce finished rhetoric; still fewer had a
range of thought and knowledge extending much beyond the ordinary
education of a gentleman and the ordinary ideas of a politician;
and the assembly was one so intolerant of rhetoric, and so much
inclined to treat, as unpractical, facts and arguments drawn from
recondite sources, that even those who possessed out-of-the-way
learning were disposed, and rightly so, to use it sparingly. In
Robert Lowe, however, a remarkable rhetorical and dialectical power
was combined with a command of branches of historical, literary, and
economic knowledge so unfamiliar to the average member as to have
for him all the charm of novelty. The rhetoric was sometimes too
elaborate. The political philosophy was not always sound. But the
rhetoric was so polished that none could fail to enjoy it; and the
political philosophy was put in so terse, bright, and pointed a form
that it made the ordinary country gentleman fancy himself a
philosopher while he listened to it in the House or repeated it to
his friends at the club. The speeches, which, though directed
against a particular measure, constituted an indictment of democratic
government in general, had the advantages of expressing what many
felt but few had ventured to say, and of being delivered from one side
of the House and cheered by the other side. No position gives a
debater in the House of Commons such a vantage ground for securing
attention. Its rarity makes it remarkable. If the speaker who
attacks his own party is supposed to do so from personal motives,
the personal element gives piquancy. If he may be credited with
conscientious conviction, his shafts strike with added weight, for
how strong must conviction be when it turns a man against his former
friends. Accordingly, nothing so much annoys a party and gratifies
its antagonists as when one of its own recalcitrant members attacks
it in flank. When one looks back now at the contents of these
speeches--there were only five or six of them--and finds one's self
surprised at their success, this favouring circumstance and the whole
temper of the so-called "upper classes" need to be remembered. The
bulk of the wealthier commercial class and a large section of the
landed class had theretofore belonged to the Liberal party. Most
of them, however, were then already beginning to pass through what
was called Whiggism into habits of thought that were practically
Tory. They did not know how far they had gone till Lowe's speeches
told them, and they welcomed his ideas as justifying their own
tendencies.
In themselves, as pieces either of rhetoric or of "civil wisdom," the
speeches are not first-rate. No one would dream of comparing them to
Burke's, in originality, or in richness of diction, or in weight of
thought. But for the moment they were far more appreciated than
Burke's were by the House of his time, which thought of dining while
he thought of convincing. Robert Lowe was for some months the idol of
a large part of the educated class, and indeed of that part chiefly
which plumed itself upon its culture. I recollect to have been in
those days at a breakfast party given by an eminent politician and
nominal supporter of the Liberal Ministry, and to have heard Mr. G. S.
Venables, the leader of the _Saturday Review_ set, an able and copious
writer who was a sort of literary and political oracle among his
friends, deliver, amid general applause, including that of the host,
the opinion that Lowe was an intellectual giant compared to Mr.
Gladstone, and that the reputation of the latter had been extinguished
for ever.
This period of glory, which was enhanced by the fall of Lord Russell
and Mr. Gladstone from power in June 1866--the defeat came on a minor
point, but was largely due to Lowe's speeches--lasted till Lowe, who
had now become a force to be counted with, obtained office as
Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Liberal Ministry which Mr.
Gladstone formed in the end of 1868. From that moment his position
declined. He lost popularity and influence both with the country and
in the House of Commons. His speeches were always able, but they did
not seem to tell when delivered from the ministerial bench. His
financial proposals, though ingenious, were thought too ingenious, and
showed a deficient perception of the tendencies of the English mind.
No section likes being taxed, but Lowe's budgets met with a more than
usually angry opposition. His economies and retrenchments, so far from
bringing him the credit he deserved, exposed him to the charge of
cheese-paring parsimony, and did much to render the Ministry
unpopular. Before that ministry fell in 1874, Lowe, who had in 1873
exchanged the Exchequer for the Home Office, had almost ceased to be a
personage in politics. He did nothing to retrieve his fame during the
six years of Opposition that followed, seldom spoke, took little part
in the denunciation of Lord Beaconsfield's Eastern and Afghan policy,
which went on from 1876 till 1880, and once at least gave slight signs
of declining mental power. So in 1880 he was relegated to the House of
Lords, because the new Liberal Government of that year could not make
room for him. Very soon thereafter his memory began to fail, and for
the last ten years of his life he had been practically forgotten,
though sometimes seen, a pathetic figure, at evening parties. There is
hardly a parallel in our parliamentary annals to so complete an
eclipse of so brilliant a luminary.
This rapid obscuration of a reputation which was genuine, for Lowe's
powers had been amply proved, was due to no accident, and was apparent
long before mental decay set in. The causes lay in himself. One cause
was purely physical. He was excessively short-sighted, so much so
that when he was writing a letter, his nose was apt to rub out the
words his pen had traced; and this defect shut him out from all that
knowledge of individual men and of audiences which is to be
obtained by watching their faces. Mr. Gladstone, who never seemed to
resent Lowe's attacks, and greatly admired his gifts--it was not so
clear that Lowe reciprocated the admiration--used to relate that on
one occasion when a foreign potentate met the Minister in St.
James's Park and put out his hand in friendly greeting, Lowe
repelled his advances, and when the King said, "But, Mr. Lowe, you
know me quite well," he answered, "Yes, indeed, I know you far too
well, and I don't want to have anything more to do with you." He
had mistaken the monarch for a prominent politician with whom he
had had a sharp encounter on a deputation a few days before! For
social purposes Lowe might almost as well have been blind; yet he did
not receive that kind of indulgence which is extended to the
blind. In the interesting fragment of autobiography which he left,
he attributes his unpopularity entirely to this cause, declaring that
he was really of a kindly nature, liking his fellow-men just as well
as most of them like one another.[42] But in truth his own character
had something to answer for. Without being ill-natured, he was deemed
a hard-natured man, who did not appear to consider the feelings of
others. He had indeed a love of mischief, and gleefully tells in
his autobiography how, when travelling in his youth through the
Scottish Highlands, he drove the too self-conscious Wordsworth wild
by his incessant praise of Walter Scott.[43] He had not in political
life more than his fair share of personal enmities. One of them was
Disraeli's. They were not unequally matched. Lowe was intellectually
in some respects stronger, but he wanted Disraeli's skill in
managing men and assemblies. Disraeli resented Lowe's sarcasms, and
on one occasion, when the latter had made an indiscreet speech, went
out of his way to inflict on him a personal humiliation.
Nor was this Lowe's only defect. Powerful in attack, he was feeble in
defence. Terrible as a critic, he had, as his official career showed,
little constructive talent, little tact in shaping or recommending his
measures. Unsteady or inconstant in purpose, he was at one moment
headstrong, at another timid or vacillating. These faults, scarcely
noticed when he was in Opposition, sensibly reduced his value as a
minister and as a Cabinet colleague.
In private Lowe was good company, bright, alert, and not unkindly. He
certainly did not, as was alleged of another famous contemporary,
Lord Westbury, positively enjoy the giving of pain. But he had a most
unchristian scorn for the slow and the dull and the unenlightened, and
never restrained his scorching wit merely for the sake of sparing
those who came in his way. If the distinction be permissible, he was
not cruel but he was merciless, that is to say, unrestrained by
compassion. Instances are not wanting of men who have maintained great
influence in spite of their rough tongues and the enmities which rough
tongues provoke. But such men have usually also possessed some of the
arts of popularity, and have been able to retain the adherence of
their party at large, even when they had alienated many who came into
personal contact with them. This was not Lowe's case. He did not
conceal his contempt for the multitude, and had not the tact needed
for humouring it, any more than for managing the House of Commons. The
very force and keenness of his intellect kept him aloof from other
people and prevented him from understanding their sentiments. He saw
things so clearly that he could not tolerate mental confusion, and was
apt to reach conclusions so fast that he missed perceiving some of the
things which are gradually borne in upon slower minds. There are also
instances of strong men who, though they do not revile their
opponents, incur hatred because their strength and activity make them
feared. Hostility concentrates itself on the opponents deemed most
formidable, and a political leader who is spared while his fellows are
attacked cannot safely assume that this immunity is a tribute to his
virtues. Incessant abuse fell to the lot of Mr. Bright, who was not
often, and of Mr. Gladstone, who was hardly ever, personally bitter in
invective. But in compensation Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone received
enthusiastic loyalty from their followers. For Lowe there was no such
compensation. Even his own side did not love him. There was also a
certain harshness, perhaps a certain narrowness, about his views. Even
in those days of rigid economics, he took an exceptionally rigid view
of all economic problems, refusing to make allowance for any motives
except those of bare self-interest. Though he did not belong by
education or by social ties to the Utilitarian group, and gave an
ungracious reception to J. S. Mill's first speeches in the House of
Commons, he was a far more stringent and consistent exponent of the
harder kind of Benthamism than was Mill himself. He professed, and
doubtless to some extent felt, a contempt for appeals to historical or
literary sentiment, and relished nothing more than deriding his own
classical training as belonging to an effete and absurd scheme of
education. He left his mark on our elementary school system by
establishing the system of payment by results, but nearly every change
made in that system since his day has tended to destroy the
alterations he made and to bring back the older condition of things,
though no doubt in an amended form. His ideas of University reform
were crude and barren, limited, indeed, to the substitution of what
the Germans call "bread studies" for mental cultivation, and to the
extension of the plan of competitive examinations for honours and
money prizes, a plan which more and more displeases the most
enlightened University teachers, and is felt to have done more harm
than good to Oxford and Cambridge, where it has had the fullest play.
He had also, and could give good reasons for his opinion, a hearty
dislike to endowments of all kinds; and once, when asked by a Royal
Commission to suggest a mode of improving their application, answered
in his trenchant way, "Get rid of them. Throw them into the sea."
It would not be fair to blame Lowe for the results which followed his
vigorous action against the extension of the suffrage in 1866, for no
one could then have predicted that in the following year the Tories,
beguiled by Mr. Disraeli, would reverse their former attitude and
carry a suffrage bill far wider than that which they had rejected a
year before. But the sequel of the successful resistance of 1866 may
stand as a warning to those who think that the course of thoroughgoing
opposition to a measure they dislike is, because it seems courageous,
likely to be the right and wise course for patriotic men. Had the
moderate bill of 1866 been suffered to pass, the question of further
extending the suffrage might possibly have slept for another thirty
years, for there was no very general or urgent cry for it among the
working people, and England would have continued to be ruled in the
main by voters belonging to the middle class and the upper section of
the working class. The consequence of the heated contest of 1866 was
not only to bring about a larger immediate change in 1867, but to
create an interest in the question which soon prompted the demand for
the extension of household suffrage to the counties, and completed in
1884-85 the process by which England has become virtually a democracy,
though a plutocratic democracy, still affected by the habits and
notions of oligarchic days. Thus Robert Lowe, as much as Disraeli and
Gladstone, may in a sense be called an author of the tremendous change
which has passed upon the British Constitution since 1866, and the
extent of which was not for a long while realised. Lowe himself never
recanted his views, but never repeated his declaration of them,
feeling that he had incurred unpopularity enough, and probably feeling
also that the case was hopeless.
People who disliked his lugubrious forecasts used to call him a
Cassandra, perhaps forgetting that, besides the distinctive feature
of Cassandra's prophecies that nobody believed them, there was another
distinctive feature, viz. that they came true. Did Lowe's? It is often
profitable and sometimes amusing to turn back to the predictions
through which eminent men relieved their perturbed souls, and see how
far these superior minds were able to discern the tendencies, already
at work in their time, which were beginning to gain strength, and were
destined to determine the future. Whoever reads Lowe's speeches of
1865-67 may do worse than glance at the same time at a book,[44] long
since forgotten, which contains the efforts of a group of young
University Liberals to refute the arguments used by him and by Lord
Cairns, the strongest of his allies, in their opposition to schemes of
parliamentary reform.
To compare the optimism of these young writers and Lowe's pessimism
with what has actually come to pass is a not uninstructive task. True
it is that England has had only thirty-five years' experience of the
Reform Act of 1867, and only seventeen years' experience of that even
greater step towards pure democracy which was effected by the
Franchise and Redistribution Acts of 1884-85. We are still far from
knowing what sorts of Parliaments and policies the enlarged suffrage
will end by giving. But some at least of the mischiefs Lowe foretold
have not arrived. He expected first of all a rapid increase in
corruption and intimidation at parliamentary elections. The quality of
the House of Commons would decline, because money would rule, and
small boroughs would no longer open the path by which talent could
enter. Members would be either millionaires or demagogues, and they
would also become far more subservient to their constituents.
Universal suffrage would soon arrive, because no halting-place between
the L10 franchise[45] and universal suffrage could be found. Placed on
a democratic basis, the House of Commons would not be able to retain
its authority over the Executive. The House of Lords, the Established
Church, the judicial bench (in that dignity and that independence
which are essential to its usefulness), would be overthrown as England
passed into "the bare and level plain of democracy where every
ant-hill is a mountain and every thistle a forest tree." These and the
other features characteristic of popular government on which Lowe
savagely descanted were pieced together out of Plato and Tocqueville,
coupled with his own disagreeable experiences of Australian politics.
None of the predicted evils can be said to have as yet become features
of the polity and government of England,[46] though the power of the
House relatively to the Cabinet does seem to be declining. Yet some of
Lowe's incidental remarks are true, and not least true is his
prediction that democracies will be found just as prone to war, just
as apt to be swept away by passion, as other kinds of government have
been. Few signs herald the approach of that millennium of peace and
enlightenment which Cobden foretold and for which Gladstone did not
cease to hope.
No one since Lowe has taken up the part of _advocatus diaboli_ against
democracy which he played in 1866.[47] Since Disraeli passed the
Household Suffrage in Boroughs Bill in 1867, a nullification of Lowe's
triumph which incensed him more than ever against Disraeli, no one has
ever come forward in England as the avowed enemy of changes designed
to popularise our government. Parties have quarrelled over the time
and the manner of extensions of the franchise, but the issue of
principle raised in 1866 has not been raised again. Even in 1884, when
Mr. Gladstone carried his bill for assimilating the county franchise
to that existing in boroughs, the Tory party did not oppose the
measure in principle, but confined themselves to insisting that it
should be accompanied by a scheme for the redistribution of seats. The
secret, first unveiled by Disraeli, that the masses will as readily
vote for the Tory party as for the Liberal, is now common property,
and universal suffrage, when it comes to be offered, is as likely to
be offered by the former party as by the latter. This gives a touch of
historical interest to Lowe's speeches of 1866. They are the swan-song
of the old constitutionalism. The changes which came in 1867 and 1884
must have come sooner or later, for they were in the natural line of
development as we see it all over the world; but they might have come
much later had not Lowe's opposition wrecked the moderate scheme of
1866. Apart from that episode Lowe's career would now be scarcely
remembered, or would be remembered by those who knew his splendid
gifts as an illustration of the maxim that mere intellectual power
does not stand first among the elements of character that go to the
winning of a foremost place.
-----
[41] A carefully written life of Lord Sherbrooke (in two volumes) by
Mr. Patchett Martin was published in 1896. The most interesting
part of it is the short fragment of autobiography with which it
begins, and which carries the story down to Lowe's arrival in
Australia.
[42] In his autobiography he writes, "With a quiet temper and a real
wish to please, I have been obliged all my life to submit to an
amount of unpopularity which I really did not deserve, and to
feel myself condemned for what were really physical rather than
moral deficiencies."
[43] There was an anecdote current in the University of Oxford down to
my time that when Lowe was examining in the examination which
the statutes call "Responsions," the dons "Little-go," and the
undergraduates "Smalls," a friend coming in while the _viva
voce_ was in progress, asked him how he was getting on.
"Excellently," said Lowe; "five men plucked already, and the
sixth very shaky." Another tale, not likely to have been
invented, relates that when he and several members of the then
Liberal Ministry were staying in Dublin with the Lord
Lieutenant, and had taken an excursion into the Wicklow hills,
they found themselves one afternoon obliged to wait for half an
hour at a railway station. To pass the time, Lowe forthwith
engaged in a dispute about the charge with the car-drivers who
had brought them, a dispute which soon became hot and noisy, to
the delight of Lowe, but to the horror of the old Lord
Chancellor, who was one of the party.
[44] _Essays on Reform_, published in 1867.
[45] The then borough qualification, which Mr. Gladstone's Bill
proposed to reduce to L7.
[46] Mr. Gladstone said to me in 1897 that the extension of the
suffrage had, in his judgment, improved the quality of
legislation, making it more regardful of the interests of the
body of the people, but had not improved the quality of the
House of Commons.
[47] Sir H. S. Maine's _Quarterly Review_ articles, published in a
volume under the title of _Popular Government_, come nearest to
being a literary presentation of the case against democracy,
but they are, with all their ingenuity and grace of style, so
provokingly vague and loosely expressed that there can seldom
be found in them a proposition with which one can agree, or
from which one can differ. E. de Laveleye's well-known book is
not much more substantial, but instruction may (as respects
France) be found in the late Edmond Scherer's _De la
Democratie_, and (as respects England and the United States) in
M. Ostrogorski's recent book, _Democracy and the Organisation
of Political Parties_.
WILLIAM ROBERTSON SMITH
Robertson Smith,[48] the most widely learned and one of the most
powerful teachers that either Cambridge or Oxford could show during
the years of his residence in England, died at the age of forty-seven
on the 31st of March 1894. To the English public generally his name
was little known, or was remembered only in connection with the
theological controversy and ecclesiastical trial of which he had been
the central figure in Scotland fifteen years before. But on the
Continent of Europe and by Orientalists generally he was regarded as
the foremost Semitic scholar of Britain, and by those who knew him as
one of the most remarkable men of his time.
He was born in 1846 in the quiet pastoral valley of the Don, in
Aberdeenshire. His father, who was a minister of the Scottish Free
Church in the parish of Keig, possessed high mathematical talent,
and his mother, who survived him six years, was a woman of great
force of character, who retained till her death, at seventy-six years
of age, the full exercise of her keen intelligence. Smith went
straight from his father's teaching to the University of Aberdeen, and
after graduating there, continued his studies first at Bonn in
1865, and afterwards at Gottingen (1869). When only twenty-four he
became Professor of Oriental Languages in the College or Divinity
School of the Free Church at Aberdeen, and two years later was
chosen one of the revisers of the Old Testament, a striking honour
for so young a man. In 1881 he became first assistant-editor and
then editor-in-chief of the ninth edition of the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_. He was exceptionally qualified for the post by the
variety of his attainments and by the extreme quickness of his
mind, which rapidly acquired knowledge on almost any kind of subject.
Those who knew him are agreed that among all the eminent men who have
been connected with this great _Encyclopaedia_ from its first
beginning nearly a century and a half ago until now, he was
surpassed by none, if equalled by any, in the range of his learning
and in the capacity to bring learning to bear upon editorial work.
He took infinite pains to find the most competent writers, and was
able to exercise effective personal supervision over a very large
proportion of the articles. The ninth edition was much fuller and
more thorough than any of its predecessors; and good as the first
twelve volumes were, a still higher level of excellence was attained
in the latter half, a result due to his industry and discernment.
Not a few of the articles on subjects connected with the Old
Testament were from his own pen; and they were among the best in the
work.