LORD BROUGHAM

After a Portrait from Life by Mayall.

ORD BROUGHAM's portraits are numerous and nearly all good. Νο man knew better than he how a great orator should look at his climaxes. He has illustrated in his pose the superiority of conscious intellectual power.

in literature, in mathematics, in science, the manifold talents which delighted while they controlled the England of 1830, came at last to be merely a member of the peerage, outliving himself and surviving into a later generation as a memento of his own inconsistencies.

If this will explain or suggest why the judgments passed upon a most extraordinary man have been so diverse, it will have its own excuse for attempting to take its place with other explanations where none are adequate. It is impossible to judge such a man as Brougham by ordinary standards. Except Benjamin Franklin, no statesman of modern times has had such a diversity of gifts or has shown such an easy mastery of the agencies through which mind controls other minds and the material world around it. He had Franklin's strong love for science. The two men illustrate the same astonishing versatility, the same strong desire to apply knowledge so as to make it of immediate practical advantage; the same ability in public affairs, the same determination so to live as to leave the world after them better, freer, and more comfortable than they found it. Yet Brougham invented no bedroom stoves and sent no kites to heaven to call down social, political, and economic revolutions out of the clouds. Lacking this gift of Franklin's, he had others which Franklin had not. He set himself to become the greatest orator in the public life of England, and succeeded. He worked as deliberately to acquire a "genius for oratory" as Franklin worked to make his open stove ventilate a bedroom. He succeeded as well. When he "learned by heart" the great orations of men whose eloquence had swayed crowds with the masterful power which mind when freely expressed always exerts, it was not to imitate but to assimilate. When he defended Queen Caroline, when he denounced the lash in the British army, when he plead for the liberation of British slaves, when he opposed himself to every enemy of progress, making himself the mouthpiece of the aspiration of the Wilberforces and the Howards, surrendering his voice to be the voice of those who are themselves speechless because of oppression, it was not Cicero, not Demosthenes, not any framer of classical periods, speaking to times of which classical modes are no longer a part, but the very deepest aspiration of the times themselves, the very highest inspiration which the present can catch from the future it is to achieve by its struggles and its sacrifices.

In the noble climax of his speech at Liverpool in 1812, after having denounced Pitt for the war upon America, Brougham said that his own proudest ambition was to be looked upon by posterity as the friend of liberty and peace.

This ambition he has realized. From 1808, when he was admitted to the bar of England, until after the struggle over the Reform Bill

of 1832, he was a great and growing force for the progress of England, not merely in power, but in all that makes civilization. He forced the fighting for the abolition of degrading punishments in the army and navy; he compelled public attention to English slaveholding and English complicity in the slave trade until the demand for action could not be evaded; he dared the displeasure of the court and won the lasting enmity of the King by taking the part of the unfortunate Queen Caroline, and at the same time he was experimenting in optics, studying mathematics, and writing scientific papers for the English Royal Society or the French Academy of Sciences.

Seeing him passing in a carriage one of his acquaintances said of him, with that resentment genius often challenges from those it seeks to benefit: "There go Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Chesterfield, and a great many more, all in one post-chaise."

If he invited such scoffs by the very eagerness of his intellectual grasp, if finally through the arrogance of attempting everything, he lost the substance for the shadow of attainment, he had achieved in the meantime more in his own lifetime than it could happen to men of normally active intellect to achieve if they lived to double his great age. It has been said that he left nothing of permanent value in literature, but his 'Statesmen of the Time of George IV.' has the rare power of compelling the reader who begins it to go on. The sketches, though they may be called nothing but sketches, have in them the life of times of which Brougham was a part, and they go with his speeches to make his intellect intelligible, not merely in its methods, but in its essence. At his best, when he was doing the work which made him great, he was not critical but constructive in his processes. His mind was creative, assimilative, ready to take from every source, no matter how humble, that which gives strength and originality. The same quality made Burke a great orator as it made Shakespeare a great poet. In spite of such weaknesses as grew on Brougham until they made him powerless to realize himself in action, it made him great-so great that when his detractors call him a failure in all the climaxes of his efforts, it is enough to answer that the world has grown more through such failures than it has through the best successes of those who dared not take such risks as he dared at the expense of failure. W. V. B.