From Hogg's Instructor. MODERN BRITISH ORATORS.-NO. III. LORD BROUGHAM AS AN ORATOR. BY GEORGE GILFILLAN. OUR former paper was devoted, as our readers may remember, to a consideration of Lord Brougham's general qualities. We are now to consider him in the special light of an orator, and in the course of our remarks to glance rapidly at his collected speeches. Every orator should possess, among others, the following qualifications: He should have earnestness; i. e., the power of feeling. He should have clearness; . e., the power of stating. He should have energy; i. e., the power of commanding. He should have imagination; i. e., the power of illustrating. And he should have persuasiveness; i. e., the power of moving or melting men into the current of his purpose. He should have earnestness. He should feel the importance, and believe in the justice, of his cause. This is all, we think, that the ancient critic meant when he said that every orator must be a good man. Every man earnestly occupied with a good or grand thought is a good man for the time. To be an orator, one must not only believe in the justice of his cause, but he must be for a season engrossed by it. He must feel as if there were no cause but it in the world; as if, like Aaron's rod, it had swallowed up all pettier objects. It is this earnest, extravagant engrossment of an orator, or series of orators, with their purpose, that has carried almost all the causes which have been carried in history. The very enormity of overstatement to which the speaker's feelings hurry him, contributes to the effect, and hastens the catastrophe. It was by this that Wilberforce gained the abolition of the slavetrade. He spoke against the slave-trade as if it were blotting out the sun in the heaven, and as if hell were but its shadow; and by dint of this dauntless, earnest, incessant exaggeration, he secured its destruction. It was bad; but, by making it even worse than it was, he wrought up the public mind to a pitch of horror against it which compelled Parliament to spue it out of its mouth. It was by this that Burke excited the indignation of the world, first against Warren Hastings, and then against the French Revolution. He knew that Hastings was a criminal, and his imagination, acting on this knowledge, turned him into a monster of immense magnitude, stretching out Briarean arms over all India, and with every hand, either holding the bribe of corruption, or wielding the dagger of death. This enormous Ogre he described to the English public in language and imagery which have never been surpassed in the written or spoken language of man; and the consequence was, that a cry for Hastings, "blood, blood, blood" rang throughout the land; his impeachment was carried by storm; his trial seemed, from its august circumstances, and the overwhelming eloquence of his accusers, and the listening silence of the surrounding country, that of a world at the bar of God, rather than that of a man at the bar of his fellow-mortals; and although, by dexterously using the instruments of parliamentary corruption and of legal delay, the culprit escaped, yet it was "so as by fire," and his story has read a lesson to governors not to trifle with human life, nor to palter with unclean gold, nor to sacrifice to selfish expediency the rights of justice, nor to deem that any criminal or doubtful course of conduct may be sanctified as well as gilded by success, which shall never be forgotten. And when, soon after, there arose on the horizon the sudden, rapid mountain storm of the French Revolution, Burke, who saw already the blood and bankruptcy, the ruin and confusion, which were to flow from it, was led to confound it with the very tempest of final doom, and at the same time, somewhat inconsistently, to cry aloud to the nations to seek to avert it; as if any aggregate of human voices could silence one peal of that transcendent hurricane, or any combination of human armies could alter the march or embarrass the motions of a "great day of God Almighty." And yet the eloquence, the enthusiasm, the genius, the insight, and not less the extravagance, in many points, of this extraordinary man's views and language, gained in some measure the purpose at which he aimed. He frightened all Europe at his own object of fear. He ran about like a man who has just seen a ghost, and his eyes told their own terrible story. Having believed, he spoke;" and seeing that he believed, most men felt themselves obliged to believe too, not only in the reality of the spectre-which was unques tionable-but in the very color, and shape, and size which it assumed to the gifted, albeit exaggerative eye of the seer. And so with the Anti-corn-law League. How did Cobden, Bright, hard-working, noble Archibald Prentice, and the rest, overturn that essentially evil, but still comparatively small, grievance? By the power of wellmanaged, eloquent, and unwearied exaggeration. They knew they had a truth, and that a truth, unlike a falsehood, can bear a great deal of dilution, and repetition, and expansion. And hence, along with the assistance of Ebenezer Elliott-who saw in a few shillings of extra duty upon foreign produce that "sackcloth of hair" which is predestined by prophecy to produce universal darkness-they rung the changes upon the Cornlaw, till it seemed to millions to mean evil in the abstract; and thus they effected their end. Now, has Brougham this power? We think that, more than almost any man of the age, he has. He is, at all events, often subject to fits of temporary earnestness and enthusiasm, and these fits he usually relieves by talk. We do not mean to compare him to Burke, whose enthusiasm was as slow as it was sanguine, as lasting in its results as it was sudden in its rise, and whose generous and impersonal but fierce wrath might be compared to one of those long days of thunder and lightning which occur in tropical climates-mountain answering to mountain; one forest set on fire, blazing emulous of another, and pole reverberating to pole the loud and earth-shaking roar. Brougham's anger comes out in short bursts and fitful flashes. But for the moment or the hour he is perfectly honest. We heard Carlyle once say of him, that he had "run all to tongue." This, if it implied that his talk is often much more masterly than his thought, is true; but if it means that his highest style of speech is altogether empty and insincere, it is an exaggeration. Brougham, when he is fairly roused, can speak with the force, freedom, directness, and dignity of one who is something higher than a lawyer or a statesman; who is a man, and a great man, too. That he thought Queen Caroline perfectly innocent, or the most amiable of women, is not very likely. But he felt that she had been wronged; that if every worm have its rights, every woman must have hers; that the guiltiest and lowest being, if unjustly used and cruelly trampled on, may cry; and it was such a cry that he reechoed to Britain, and so reëchoed that the country shook, and the throne tottered. In their mere dealing with evidence, we do not greatly admire those speeches in defence of the Queen; but, as taking the loftiest moral ground possible on such a subject-as lifting up the Golden Rule above all the laws of the realm, and flashing it in the eyes of monarchy, like the words, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin," in the halls of Babylon-they deserve all praise. Old Boswell of Auchinleck used to praise Cromwell for having taught kings that they had a "lith in their neck.' It was reserved for Brougham and his intrepid coadjutor, Lord Denman, two centuries later, to bring the country to all but the point of renewing the tremendous lesson. Familiar as the following passage may be to many of our readers, we shall yet quote it in illustration of these remarks: Such, my Lords, is the case before you. Such is the evidence in support of this measure; evideprive of a civil right; ridiculous to convict of dence inadequate to prove a debt; impotent to the lowest offence; scandalous, if brought forward to support a charge of the highest nature which the law knows; monstrous to ruin the honor, to blast the name, of an English queen! My Lords, I pray you to pause. I do earnestly beseech you to take heed. You are standing on forth your judgment, if sentence shall go against the brink of a precipice; then beware! It will go the Queen. But it will be the only judgment you ever pronounced which, instead of reaching its object, will return and bound back upon those who give it. Save the country, my Lords, from the horrors of this catastrophe; save yourselves from this peril; rescue that country of which you are the ornaments, but in which you can flourish no longer, when severed from the people, than the blossom when cut off from the roots and the stem of the tree. Save that country, that you may continue to adorn it; save the crown, which is in 1854.] jeopardy-the aristocracy, which is shaken; save the altar, which must stagger with the blow that rends its kindred throne! You have said, my Lords, you have willed-the Church and the King have willed-that the Queen should be deprived of its solemn service. She has, instead of that solemnity, the heartfelt prayers of the people. She wants no prayers of mine. But I do here pour forth my humble supplications at the Throne of mercy, that that mercy may be poured out upon the people in a larger measure than the merits of its rulers may deserve, and that your hearts may turned to justice! These words are strong-simple, although elaborate. Yet we have heard a hundred perorations of speeches and of sermons nearly as well composed. It was the intensity of the interest of the occasion which gave them such prodigious power. Brougham, when he uttered these solemn sentences, felt that he might be ringing the deathknell of the monarchy. He knew, besides, that angry Britain stood behind him, like a roused lion, to back him in his boldest words, and that nothing could be either too solemn or too daring for that great hour-an hour which might become the brief dark passage into a new era. And it is his praise that he neither sank below nor rose too rashly above the crisis in which he found himself, but kept along the level of its dignity, and that, thereby, he contributed to save himself, his client, the crown, and his country. Many, we know, look upon the enthusiasm and half-uprise of the British people in behalf of the Queen, with contempt and disgust, especially when viewed in connection with much in her character which was unquestionably coarse and even dubious. We have always had a different opinion from the hour when (after having read the account of the acquittal) we ran out, a bareheaded boy, to the bridge of Comrie, and danced for glad ness as we saw the three villages, Dalginross, Comrie, and Ross, lighted up in one blaze of illumination, which, coupled with the dimly. seen forms of the grand mountains around, made the valley seem one of enchantmentdown to the present moment, when we are disposed to regard that movement as one of the noblest swellings of the mighty heart of Britain; to call the rejoicings which succeeded it the Carnival of Justice, and to see in the experiences of that time a warning which those who run may read, and those who read themoppose not may run, to all who dare to selves to the general sentiment of a nation, to that Vox Populi which is so often Vox Dei. am as Brougham has in other instances exemplified the same power of rising to the measure and stature of great intellectual or moral occasions. Look to what a height he has occasionally soared on the subject of slavery; a topic such as no ancient orator ever had to wield; a topic appealing to the primal sympathies of humanity, as well as to the laws of everlasting righteousness; on which can be brought to bear at once every argument derived from reason, every motive connected with feeling, and every principle furnished by religion: and around which, too, circles a halo of dark grandeur, like the ring which surrounds the tropical sun ere the storm has learned in its history and bearings, and stung burst! Strong in the logic of the question, into sacred fury by a sense of the cruelties and enormities of the system, Henry Broughnever seemed more himself, never sumed an attitude either in itself grander or more true to the better tendencies of his own nature, than when he stood up the advocate of the slave. It was not Ethiopia stretching out, in awful appeal, her hands unto God; nobler still, it seemed the Caucasian racethe white man-through his highest living representative, uplifting the protest of a common nature against the wrongs inflicted by oppressors on a humble, defenceless family, to the judgment-seat of the Almighty. But at times it became more than protest or appeal. At times the orator seemed to exchange places with the Being he was obtesting, to become at least an organ, prophet, or angel of His will; to receive into his hands one of those vials "filled with the fierceness and the wrath" of the Ruler of the universe," that he might pour it out upon the stiffnecked and hard-hearted tyrants of the Antilles. Listen to the well-known words, sounding--do they not ?--hoarse and hollow, as peals of thunder from a sky dark as that of the Deluge: Tell me not of rights; talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves; I deny the right; I acknowledge not the property: the principles, the feelings of our common nature rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim! There is a law above all the enactments of human codes—the same throughout the world, the same in all times-such as it was before the daring genius of Columbus pierced the night of ages, and opened to one world the sources of power, wealth, and knowledge-to another all unutterable woes, such as it is at this day it is the law written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable late, that the surest way to prevent immoderate and eternal, while men despise fraud, and loathe desires being formed-ay, and unjust demands enrapine, and abhor blood, they will reject with in- forced-is to grant in due season the moderate redignation the wild and guilty phantasy that man quests of justice? You stand, my Lords, on the can hold property in man. In vain you appeal to brink of a great event; you are in the crisis of a treaties; the covenants of the Almighty, whether whole nation's hopes and fears. An awful imthe old covenant or the new, denounce such un- portance hangs over your decision. Pause, ere holy pretensions. To those laws did they of old you plunge! But among the awful considerations refer who maintained the African trade. Such that now bow down my mind, there is one which treaties did they cite, and not untruly: for by one stands preeminent above the rest. You are the shameful compact you bartered the glories of highest judicature in the realm; you sit here as Blenheim for the traffic in blood; yet, in despite judges, and decide all causes, civil and criminal, of law and of treaty, that infernal traffic is now without appeal. It is a judge's first duty never to destroyed, and its votaries put to death like other pronounce sentence, in the most trifling case, withpirates. How came this change to pass? Not, out hearing. Will you make this the exception? assuredly, by Parliament leading the way; but the Are you really prepared to determine, but not to country at length awoke; the indignation of the hear, the mighty cause on which a nation's hopes people was kindled; it descended in thunder, and and fears hang? You are? Then beware of smote the traffic, and scattered its guilty profits to your decision! Rouse not, I beseech you, a peacethe winds. Now, then, let the planters beware; loving but a resolute people; alienate not from let their assemblies beware; let the government your body the affections of a whole empire. As at home beware; let the Parliament beware! The your friend, as the friend of my order, as the friend same country is once more awake-awake to the of my country, as the faithful servant of my sovcondition of negro slavery; the same indignationereign, I counsel you to assist with your utterkindles in the bosom of the same people; the most efforts in preserving the peace, and upholdsame cloud is gathering that annihilated the slave-ing and perpetuating the constitution. Therefore trader; and if it shall descend again, they on whom its crash may fall will not be destroyed before I have warned them; but I pray that their destruction may turn away from us the more terrible judgments of God. As another specimen of this same style, in which the orator is sublimated into the man, we give the following extract from his speech on the Reform Bill: These portentous appearances, the growth of later times-these figures that stalk abroad, of unknown stature and strange form-unions, and leagues, and musterings of men in myriads, and conspiracies against the exchequer-whence do they spring, and how came they to haunt our shores? What power engendered these uncouth shapes? What multiplied the monstrous births, till they people the land? Trust me, the same power which called into frightful existence and armed with resistless force the Irish volunteers of 1782; the same power which rent in twain your empire, and raised up thirteen republics; the same power which created the Catholic Association, and gave it Ireland for a portion; what power is that? Justice denied, rights withheld, wrongs perpetrated; the force which common injuries lend to millions; the wickedness of using the sacred trust of government as a means of indulging private caprice; the idiocy of treating Englishmen like the children of the South Sea Islands; the frenzy of believing, or making believe, that the adults of the nineteenth century can be led like children, or driven like barbarians! This it is which has conjured up the strange sights at which we now stand aghast. And shall we persist in the fatal error of combating the giant progeny, instead of extirpating the execrable parent? Will men never learn wisdom, even from their own experience? Will they never believe, till it be too I pray and I exhort you not to reject this measure. By all you hold most dear, by all the ties that bind every one of us to our common order and our common country, I solemnly adjure you, I warn you, I implore you-yea, on my bended knees I supplicate you, reject not this bill! ་ Oratorical adjurations, like the above, are hazardous experiments. Demosthenes has one very fine one in his oration for the crown, where he swears by the dead at Marathon. De Quincey somewhere commemorates one by a dissenting minister at Cambridge (was it Robinson, Hall's predecessor, we wonder?) as the finest in all oratory. "I adjure you by the Iliad,' by the Odyssey,'" said this daring divine, rising to a climax in his appeal. It was certainly very striking, although we wonder how the congregations of any of our Edinburgh doctors would look, if their pastors would now venture on such a splendid extravagance. As to Brougham's flight, there have been various opinions, particularly in reference to the attitude assumed at the end. Some think, that it nobly and gracefully rounded off, as it were, the excitement. of the speaker; others have derided it, and asked, "Ere going down on his knee, did he spread his handkerchief below it, as we have seen done by careful old bachelors ere kneeling at prayers?" Much, we think, must have depended upon the state to which he had wrought up his audience. An orator who has obtained perfect mastery over the assembly he addresses, may venture on attitudes and images, and words, which to a less excited and sympathetic throng would appear helplessly absurd. There was, besides, a certain propriety in this attitude connected with the office which Brougham then held. Kneeling as a chancellor upon the woolsack, it seemed as if Eternal Justice were, in his person, kneeling before the lords of Parliament in behalf of the rights of the people of England. We find we cannot pursue any farther at present our investigation of the oratorical qualities we have ascribed to Lord Brougham, else we might have dilated on his prodigious energy, on the clearness which more than matched the strength of his statements, and on the fiery hue of passion which eclipsed the imagination and fancy of his more highlywrought passages. Indeed, of imagination proper he had little or none. Fancy he apparently disdained; but he knew too well the power which imagination gives to eloquence, not to have employed it, if he had any to employ. The place of this remarkable man in the great gallery of future ages is not, as yet, thoroughly fixed. We incline to believe, however, that his orb will rather lessen than seem to enlarge, as the years roll on. His name shall live as the Admirable Crichton of the nineteenth century--a name which expresses both his marvellous powers, his still more marvellous weaknesses, and his most marvellous eccentricities; his splendid charlatanerie, and his solid, unquestionable power. Passages of his speeches will be found in the collections of the twentysecond or twenty-third centuries. A full page or even two will be devoted to his history in future Conversations-Lexicons. But he has written no work even aspiring to completeness, and left no great thought as the projected shadow of his soul to after generations. He has neither been a philosopher, nor an original discoverer in politics, nor a poetic thinker; only a wonderful talker on ten thousand subjects, floating or fixed. There are in his works many passages of great force and eloquence; but there is little of that rich, suggestive matter, that "lion's marrow" of thought, which feeds all ages as plentifully as the period when it is first collected. His speeches are, and must always be, interesting from the causes they plead, from their relation to great events in history, from the extraordinary character and repute of the man, as well as from much that is vital in their own language; but they are neither models of style nor quarries of thinking. Far less enviable their fame-proud and powerful as they are-than that of a little series of letters to a female friend, which about fifty years ago were issuing from a dingy lodging in France, where a dullbright Titan, as strong as he was slow and gloomy as he was strong, was sitting in the shape of an unpopular and obscure dissenting teacher, and sweltering and agonizing over his iron immortalities-we mean, of course, John Foster. All hail, we cry, to that original genius which bends before the Cross! The brilliant pages of the Edinburgh Review, the sparkling speeches of Jeffrey, the sterner and stronger paragraphs of Brougham, if not altogether destitute of that salt of genius which gives life to writing, are destitute entirely of that Christian consecration which has embalmed the works of many whom, in the pride of their popularity, these men once disdained to set with the dogs of their flock. John Foster was never even noticed in the Edinburgh Review; (the name of his Essay on Popular Ignorance was prefixed to a paper on Education, written by Brougham, but without the slightest allusion in the article either to the author or the book!) and yet, we venture to affirm that his works are exciting a deeper, a scarcely less wide, and an infinitely more beneficial influence upon the age, than all the writings of the Edinburgh school-including in that designation, not only Jeffrey and Brougham, but Sidney Smith, Hallam, and Macaulay-put together. Truly, when we remember the difference of the estimates once and now formed by the public of such men as Foster and Coleridge, and, on the other hand, of such men as Jeffrey and Brougham, we are tempted to accommodate the Scripture language, and say, "The little one has become a thousand, and the thousand a small nation." Talent can dazzle for a time, but can never produce the permanent results or do the wondrous work of Genius : and Genius never can do its own work fully, or with the unmixed acceptance of posterity, unless it has seen the divine truth, and learned to breathe the unearthly spirit of the gospel of Jesus Christ. |