in the London papers quite as often and as prominently for some months
as Mr. Bright's; and, moreover, he had met Mr. Beales at dinner, and did
not like to be told that he had not thereby made the acquaintance of a
great tribune of the British people. So I dropped the subject and
allowed our Bright and and our Beales to rank together without farther
protest.
Here in New York, where English politics are understood infinitely
better than in Paris, I have noticed not a little of this "Bright and
Beales" classification when people talk of the leaders of English
Liberalism. I have heard, with surprise, this or that respectable member
of Parliament, who never for a moment dreamed of being classed among the
chiefs of his party, exalted to a place of equality with Gladstone or
Bright. In truth the English Liberal party (I mean now the advancing and
popular party--not the old Whigs) has only three men who can be called
leaders. After Gladstone, Bright, and Mill there comes a huge gap--and
then follow the subalterns, of whom one might name half a dozen having
about equal rank and influence, and of whom you may choose any favorite
you like. Take, for example, Mr. W. E. Forster, Mr. Stansfeld, Mr.
Thomas Hughes, the O'Donoghue, Mr. Coleridge (who, however, is marked
out for the judicial bench, and therefore need hardly be counted), and
one or two others, and you have the captains of the advanced Liberal
party. The Liberals are not rich in rising talent; at least there seems
no man of the younger political generation who gives any promise of
commanding ability. They have many good debaters and clever politicians,
but I see no "pony Gladstone" to succeed him who used to be called the
"pony Peel;" and the man has yet to show himself in whom the House of
Commons can hope for a future Bright. The great Liberals of our day have
apparently not the gift of training disciples in order that the latter
may become apostles in their time. Like Cavour, they are too earnest
about the work and do too much of it themselves to have leisure or
inclination for teaching and pushing others.
Officially Mr. Gladstone has been, of course, for several years the
leader of the party. He is formally invested with all the insignia of
command. He is indeed the only possible leader; for he is the only man
who has the slightest chance just now of commanding the allegiance of
the old Whigs with their dukes and earls, and the young Radicals with
their philosophers, their Comtists, their Irish Nationalists, and their
working men. But the true soul and voice and heart of the Liberal party
pay silent allegiance to John Bright. He is, by universal
acknowledgment, the maker of the Reform agitation and the Reform Bill.
Mr. Disraeli has over and over again flung in the face of Mr. Gladstone
the fact that Bright, and not he, is the master spirit of Radicalism. Of
late the Tories have taken to praising and courting Bright incessantly
and ostentatiously, and contrasting his calm, consistent wisdom with
Gladstone's impetuosity and fitfulness. Of course both Bright and
Gladstone thoroughly understand the meaning of this, and smile at it and
despise it. The obvious purpose is to try to set up a rivalry between
the two. If Gladstone's authority could be damaged that would be quite
enough; for it would be impossible at present to get the Whig dukes and
earls to follow Bright, and the dethronement of Gladstone would be the
break-up of the party. The trick is an utter failure. Bright is
sincerely and generously loyal to Gladstone, and is a man as completely
devoid of personal vanity or self-seeking as he is of fear. No personal
question will ever divide these two men.
Gladstone is beyond doubt the most fluent and brilliant speaker in the
English Parliament. No other man has anything like his inexhaustible
flow and rush of varied and vivid expression. His memory is as
surprising as his fluency. Grattan spoke of the eloquence of Fox as
"rolling in resistless as the waves of the Atlantic." So far as this
description conveys the idea of a vast volume of splendid words pouring
unceasingly in, it may be applied to Gladstone. A listener new to the
House is almost certain to prefer him to any other speaker there, and to
regard him as the greatest English orator of the present generation. I
was myself for a long time completely under the spell, and a little
impatient of those who insisted on the superiority of Bright. But when
one becomes accustomed to the speaking of the two men it is impossible
not to find the fluency, the glitter, the impetuous volubility, the
involved and complicated sentences, the Latinized, sesquipedalian words
of Gladstone gradually losing their early charm and influence, just as
the pure noble Saxon, the unforced energy, the exquisite simplicity, the
perfect "fusion of reason and passion" which are the special
characteristics of Bright's eloquence, grow more and more fascinating
and commanding. Perhaps the same effect may be found to arise from a
study or a contrast (if one must contrast them) between the political
characters of the two men.
It is a somewhat singular fact that one English county has produced the
three men who undoubtedly rank beyond all others in England as
Parliamentary orators. The Earl of Derby, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Bright
are all Lancashire men. But Gladstone is only Lancashire by birth. His
shrewd old Scotch father came to Liverpool from across the Tweed, and
made his money and founded his family in the great port of the Mersey.
The Gladstones had, and have, large West Indian property; and when
England emancipated her slaves by paying off the planters, the
Gladstones came in for no small share of the national purchase-money.
When the great Liberal orator came out so impetuously and unluckily with
his celebrated panegyric on Jefferson Davis, a few years ago, some
people shook their heads and remarked that the old planter spirit does
not quite die out in the course of one generation; and I heard bitter
allusion made to the celebrated declaration flung by Cooke, the great
tragedian, in the face of an indignant theatre in Liverpool, that there
was not a stone in the walls of that town which was not "cemented by the
blood of Africans." But, indeed, Gladstone's outburst had no
traditional, or hereditary, or other such source. It came straight from
the impulsive heart and nature of the speaker. His strength and his
weakness are alike illustrated by that sudden, indiscreet,
unjustifiable, and repented outburst. Thus he every now and then
disappoints his friends and shakes the confidence of his followers. A
keen, intellectual, cynical member of the Liberal party, Mr. Grant Duff,
not long since publicly reproached Mr. Gladstone with this trick of
suddenly "turning round and firing his revolver in the face of his
followers." Certain it is that there is little or no enthusiasm felt
toward Gladstone personally, by his party. Admirers of Mr. Disraeli are
usually devotees of the man himself. Young men, especially, delight in
him and adore him. Mr. Gladstone is followed as a leader, admired as an
orator; but I have heard very few of his followers ever express any
personal affection or enthusiasm for him; but it is quite notorious in
London that some of his adherents can hardly control their dislike of
him. Mr. Bright, although a man of somewhat cold and reserved demeanor,
and occasionally _brusque_ in manner, is popular everywhere in the
House. Mr. Gladstone is not personally popular even among his own
followers. What is the reason? His enemies say that he has a bad temper
and an unbending intellectual pride, which is as untrue as if they were
to say he had a hoarse voice and a stammer. The obscurest man in the
House of Commons is not more modest; and there is nothing ungenial in
his manner or his temper. But the truth is that people cannot rely upon
him, or think they cannot, which, so far as they are concerned, amounts
to the same thing. His strongest passion in life--stronger than his love
of figures, or of Homer, or even of liberty--is a love of argument. He
is always ready to sacrifice his friend, or his party, or even his
cause, to his argument. Add to this that he has a conscience so
sensitive that it can hardly ever find any cause or deed smooth enough
to be wholly satisfactory; add, moreover, that he has an eloquence so
fluent as to flow literally away from him, or with him, and the wonder
will be how such a man ever came to be the successful leader of a great
party at all. He is always reconsidering what he has done, always
penitent for something he has said, always turning up to-day the side of
the question which everybody supposed was finally put away and done with
yesterday.
You can read all this in his face. Furrowed with deep and rigid lines,
it proclaims a certain self-torturing nature--the nature of the
penitent, self-examining ascetic, whose heart is always vexed by doubts
of his own worth and purity, and past and future. Decidedly, Gladstone
wants force of character, and force of intellect as well. He is not a
man of great thought. Every such man settles a question, so far as he is
himself concerned, finally, one way or the other, before long; sees and
accepts what the human limitations of thinking are; recognizes the
necessity of being done with mere thinking about it, and so decides and
is free to act. There is intellectual weakness in Gladstone's
interminable consideration and reconsideration, qualification and
requalification of every subject and branch of a subject. But there is
also a strong, genuine, unmingled delight in mere argument--perhaps as
barren a delight as human intellect can yield to.
Last year there were three Fenian prisoners lying under sentence of
death in Manchester. Their crime was such as undoubtedly all civil
governments are accustomed to punish by death. But there was
considerable sympathy for them, partly because of their youth, partly
because the deed they had done--the killing of a policeman in order to
rescue a political conspirator--did not seem to be a mere base and
malignant murder. Some eminent Liberals, Mr. Bright among the rest,
endeavored to obtain a mitigation of the sentence. The Tory Government
refused; then a point of law was raised on their behalf, and argued in
the House of Commons. The point was new, the Tory law-officers, dull men
at the best, were taken by surprise, and broke down in reply. Yet there
was a reply, and legally, a sufficient one. Mr. Gladstone saw it; saw
where the point raised was defective, and how it might be disposed of.
He sprang to his feet, pulled the Tory law-officers out of their
difficulty, and upset the case for the Fenians. Now this must have
seemed to a conscientious man quite the right thing to do. To a lover of
argument the temptation of upsetting a defective plea was irresistible.
But most of Mr. Gladstone's Irish followers, on whom he must needs rely,
were surprised and angry, and even some of his English friends thought
he might have left the Tories unaided to hang their own political
prisoners. Gladstone's conduct was eminently characteristic. No
impartial man could honestly say that he had done a wrong thing; but no
one acquainted with political life could feel surprised that a leader
who habitually does such things, is almost always being grumbled at by
one or other section of his followers.
There is an obvious lack of directness as well as of robustness in the
whole intellectual and political character of the man. I think it was
Nathaniel Hawthorne who said of General McClellan that if he could only
have shut one eye he might have gone straight into Richmond almost at
any time during his command of the Army of the Potomac. I am sure if
Gladstone would only close one eye now and then he might lead his party
much more easily to splendid victory. With all his great, varied,
comprehensive faculties, he is not a man to make a deep mark on the
history of his country. He has to be driven on. Somebody must stand
behind him. He is not self-sufficing. His style of eloquence is not
straightforward, cleaving its way like an arrow. It goes round and round
a subject, turning it up, holding it to the light, now this way, now
that, examining and re-examining it. Even his reform speeches are as
Disraeli once said very happily of Lord Palmerston, rather speeches
about Reform than orations on behalf of it. He is indeed the brilliant
Halifax of his age--at least he is a complete embodiment of Lord
Macaulay's Halifax. A leader with so many splendid gifts and merits, no
English parliamentary party of modern times has ever had. Taking manner,
voice, elocution and all into account, as is but right in judging of a
speaker, I think he is the most splendid of all English orators. Burke's
manner and accent were terribly against him; Fox was full of repetition,
and often stammered and stuttered in the very rush and tumult of his
thoughts; Sheridan's glitter was sometimes tawdriness; both the Pitts
were given to pompousness and affectation; Bright has neither the silver
voice nor the varied information of Gladstone; Disraeli I do not rank
among orators at all. Gladstone has none of the special defects of any
of these men, yet I am convinced that Fox was a _greater_ orator than
Gladstone; I know that Bright is; while Burke's speeches are, as
intellectual studies, incomparably beyond anything that Gladstone will
ever bequeath to posterity; and as instruments to an end, some of
Disraeli's speeches have been more effective and triumphant than
anything ever spoken by his present rival.
In brief, Gladstone is not, to my thinking, a _great_ orator; and I do
not believe he is a great statesman. A great statesman, I presume, is
tested by a crisis, and is greatest at a crisis. Such was Chatham; such
was Washington; such was Napoleon Bonaparte; such was Cavour; such is
Bismarck. All I have seen of Gladstone compels me to believe that he is
not such a man. He is just the man to lead the Liberal party at this
time; but I should despair of the triumph of that party for the present
generation, if there were not stronger and simpler minds behind his to
keep him in the right way, to drive him on--and, above all, to prevent
him from recoiling after he has made an effective stride forward.
One of the great questions likely to arise soon in English political
discussion is that of national education. On educational questions I
fancy Mr. Gladstone is rather narrow-minded and old-fashioned; taking
too much the tone and view of a college Don. His recent severance from
the political representation of Oxford may have done something to
release his mind from tradition and pedantry; but I much doubt whether
he will not be found sadly wanting when a serious attempt is made to
revolutionize the principles and the system of the English universities,
and to substitute there (I quote again the language of Grant Duff) "the
studies of men for the studies of children." Gladstone is a devotee of
classical study; and his whole nature is under the influence of
aestheticism, or of what is commonly called "sentiment." The sweet and
genial traditions of the past have immense influence over him. His love
of Greek poetry and of Italian art follow him into politics. With the
Teuton, his poetry and his politics he has little or no sympathy; and I
think the question to be decided shortly as regards the university
system in England maybe figuratively described as a question between
Classic and Teuton. Gladstone is a profound Greek and Latin scholar--a
master of Italian, a connoisseur of Italian art; he does not, I believe,
know or care much about German literature. Accordingly, he was a devoted
Philhellene and a passionate champion of Italian independence; while the
outbreak of the recent struggle between the past and the present in
Germany found him indifferent, and probably even ignorant. So it was in
regard to the American crisis the other day. He knew little of American
politics and national life; and the whole thing was a bewilderment and a
surprise to him. If the Laocoon had been the work of a New England
artist I think the North would have found at once a warm advocate in Mr.
Gladstone.
Of a mould utterly different is John Bright, at the very root of whose
character are found simplicity and straightforwardness. By simplicity I
do not mean freedom from pretence or affectation; for no man can be more
thoroughly unaffected and sincere than Gladstone. I mean that purely
intellectual attribute which frees the judgment from the influence of
complex emotions; which distinguishes at once essentials from
non-essentials; which sees at a glance the true end and the real way to
it, and can go directly onward. Men supremely gifted with this great
practical quality are commonly set down as men of one idea. In this
sense, undoubtedly, John Bright is a man of one idea; but the phrase
does not justly describe him, or men like him, who are peculiar merely
in having an accurate appreciation of what I may call political
perspective, and thus knowing what proportion of public consideration
certain objects ought, under certain circumstances, to obtain.
So far as ideas are the offspring of information, Mr. Bright has
undoubtedly fewer ideas than some of his contemporaries. He is not a
profound classical scholar like Gladstone; he has had nothing like the
varied culture of Lowe; he makes, of course, no pretence to the
attainments of Mill, who is at once a master of science, of classics,
and of _belles-lettres_. But given a subject, almost any subject, coming
at all within the domain of politics or economics, and time to think
over it, and he is much more likely to be right in his judgment of it
than any of the three men I have named. He is gifted beyond any
Englishman now living with the rare and admirable faculty of seeing
right into the heart of a subject, and discerning what it means and what
it is worth. Nor is this ever a lucky jump at a conclusion. Bright never
gives an opinion at random or off-hand. Some new policy is announced;
some new subject is broached in the House of Commons; and Bright sits
silent and listens. Friends and followers come round him and ask him
what he thinks of it. "Wait until to-morrow and I will tell you," is
almost invariably, in whatever form of words, the tenor of his
reply--and to-morrow's judgment is certain to be right. I can remember
no great public question coming up in England for the past dozen years
in regard to which Mr. Bright's deliberate judgment did not prove itself
to be just.
This quality of sagacious judgment, however valuable and uncommon, would
not of itself make a man a great statesman or even a great party leader;
but it is only one of many remarkable attributes which are found
harmoniously illustrated in the character of Mr. Bright. I do not mean,
however, to dwell at any length here on the place John Bright holds in
English political life or the qualities which have won him that place.
He has lately been the subject of an article in this magazine, and he is
indeed better known to American readers than any other English political
man now living. One or two observations are all that just now seem
necessary to make.
Men who have not heard Bright speak, and who only know him by repute as
a powerful tribune of the people, a demagogue ("John of Bromwicham,"
Carlyle calls him, classing him with John of Leyden), are naturally apt
to think of him as an impetuous, passionate, stormy orator, shaking
people's souls with sound and fury. Almost anybody who only knew the two
men vaguely and by rumor, would be likely to assume that the style of
the classical Gladstone was stately, calm, and regular; that of the
popular orator and democrat, impetuous, rugged, and vehement. Now, the
great characteristic of Gladstone, after his fluency, is his
impetuosity; that of Bright is his magnificent composure and
self-control. Intensity is his great peculiarity. He never foams or
froths or bellows, or wildly gesticulates. The heat of his oratorical
passion is a white heat which consumes without flash or smoke or
sputter. Some of his greatest effects have been produced by passages of
pathetic appeal, of irony, or of invective, which were delivered with a
calm intensity that might almost have seemed coldness, if the fire of
genius and of eloquence did not burn beneath it. Another remark I should
make is that Mr. Bright is the greatest master of pure Saxon English now
speaking the English language. As the blind commonly have their sense of
sound and of touch intensified, so it may be that Mr. Bright's
comparative indifference to classic and foreign literature has tended to
concentrate all his attention upon the culture of pure English, and
given him a supreme faculty of appreciating and employing it. Certain it
is that his unvarying choice of the very best Saxon word in every case
seems to come from an instinct which is in itself something like genius.
Finally, let me remark, that the extent of Mr. Bright's democratic
tendencies would probably disappoint some Americans. I may say now what
I should probably have been laughed at for saying two or three years
ago, that there is a good deal of the conservative about John Bright;
that he is by nature disposed to shrink from innovation; that change for
the mere sake of change is quite abhorrent to him; and that he is about
the last man in England who would care to make political war for an
idea. He seems to me to be the only one Englishman I have lately spoken
with who retains any genuine feeling of personal loyalty toward the
sovereign of England. But for his eloquence and his power, I fancy Mr.
Bright would seem rather a slow sort of politician to many of the
younger Radicals. The "Times" lately attributed Mr. Bright's
conservatism to his advancing years. This was merely absurd. Mr. Bright
is little older now than O'Connell was when he began his Parliamentary
career. He is considerably younger than Disraeli, or Gladstone, or Mill.
What Bright now is he always was. A dozen years ago he was defending the
Queen and Prince Albert against the attacks of Tories and of some
Radicals. He never was a Democrat in the French or Italian sense. He has
always been wanting even, in sympathy, with popular revolution abroad.
He never showed the slightest interest in speculative politics. I doubt
if he ever talked of the "brotherhood of peoples." He has been driven
into political agitation only because, like Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, he
saw positive, practical, and pressing grievances bearing down upon his
neighbors, which he felt called by duty to make war against. I have many
times heard Mr. Bright say that he detests the House of Commons, and
would be glad if it were permitted him never to mount a platform again.
But if Mr. Bright had little natural inclination for a Parliamentary
career, what is one to say of Mr. John Stuart Mill's natural
disinclination for such a path of life?