(Leader, 7 July 1855)
IT IS matter of very common observation that members of the ‘privileged classes’, who, either from want of work or want of ability to do their proper work, find their time hang rather heavily on their hands, try to get rid of it by employments which, if not self-imposed, they would think rather pitiable. Kings and emperors have turned their hands to making locks and sealing-wax; ambassadresses have collected old stockings for the sake of darning them; and we knew a wealthy old gentleman who devoted himself to making pokers, which he presented to all the ladies of his acquaintance. It is generally presumed of such people that if they had brains to enable them to do anything better, they would prosecute this voluntary artisanship with less zeal; still, the case of these incapables is one to be charitably smiled at or sighed over, not gravely rebuked: we graciously accept the present of their lock or their poker and say no more about it. But it would be a different affair if these voluntary artisans were to set up shop – if, for example, Lord Α., or Sir B. C., or any other of the tribe of wealthy Englishmen to whom foreigners give the generic title of milord, were not only to amuse himself with making boots, but were to hire a shop frontage, with plate glass, and exhibit his clumsy wares to the public with as much pomp and circumstance as if he were a very Hoby,1 thereby inducing snobbish people to set the fashion of wearing and crying up Lord A.’s boots, to the depreciation of really well-made articles, and to the great detriment both of human candour and the human foot. Political economists and bootmakers, lady-loves and orthopaedists, science and æsthetics, would vote the aristocratic Crispin2 a nuisance.
A sufficiently close parallel to this hypothetic case is suggested by Lord Brougham’s Lives of Men of Letters, the sight of which, republished in a cheap form, has, we confess, roused our critical gall. Relieved from the labours of his chancellorship, Lord Brougham, we suppose, found a good deal of leisure on his hands; and how did he employ it? By taking to what we may call literary lock and poker-making – by writing third-rate biographies in the style of a literary hack! Biographies, too, of men whose lives had already been depicted in all sorts of ways, and presented to us in all sorts of lights – like Prince Albert’s face and legs. If we had found these Lives of Men of Letters in a biographical dictionary, we should perhaps have thought them about up to the average of the piecework usually to be met with in such compilations; finding them, as we did more than ten years ago, in an édition de luxe adorned with portraits, and with Lord Brougham’s name on the title-page, we felt some simmering indignation at such gratuitous mediocrities in a pretentious garb; and now that we see them in a cheaper reissue – as if there were any demand for these clumsy superfluities, these amateur locks and pokers – our indignation fairly boils over. We have not the slightest wish to be disrespectful to Lord Brougham. His name is connected with some of the greatest movements in the last half century, and in general, is on the side of the liberal and the just. But he has been a successful man; his reputation is fully equal to his merit; society is unanimous in pronouncing that he has done many things well and wisely; and there is, therefore, no reason why we should be reticent of our criticism where, in our opinion, he has done some things less wisely and not well.
The first thing that strikes us in these Lives is the slovenliness of their style, which is thrown almost ludicrously into relief by the fact that many of Lord Brougham’s pages are occupied with criticism of other men’s style. The hard-run literary man, who is every moment expecting the knock of the printer’s boy, has reason enough to renounce fastidiousness; but his lordship, in the elegant ease of his library, with no call impending but that of the lunch or dinner-bell, might at least atone for the lack of originality by finish – might, if he has no jewels to offer us, at least polish his pebbles. How far he has done this we will let the reader judge by giving some specimens of the manner in which Lord Brougham contrives
To blunt a moral and to spoil a tale.3
One of his reproaches against Gibbon’s style is, that it is ‘prone to adopt false and mixed metaphors’; but we doubt whether the Decline and Fall could furnish us with a more typical specimen of that kind than one which he himself gives us in his life of Voltaire. ‘Proofs also remain,’ says Lord Brougham, ‘which place beyond all doubt his (Voltaire’s) kindness to several worthless men, who repaid it with the black ingratitude so commonly used as their current coin by the base and spiteful, who thus repay their benefactors and salve their own wounded pride by pouring venom on the hand that saved or served them.’ Again, in the life of Johnson, we read: ‘Assuredly, we may in vain search all the Mantuan tracery of sweets for any to excel them in the beauty of numbers.’ It may be our ignorance of confectionery that prevents us from perceiving what ‘tracery’ can have to do with ‘sweets’; as it is, however, we can only explain his lordship’s metaphor by supposing tracery to be a misprint for tea-tray, since misprints abound in this volume. Lord Brougham is very frequently quite as infelicitous in his phrases, and in the structure of his sentences, as in his metaphors. For example: ‘It is none of the least absurd parts of Condorcet’s work, that he, being so well versed in physical and mathematical science, passes without any particular observation the writings of Voltaire on physical subjects, when he was so competent to pronounce an opinion upon their merits.’ ‘Condorcet was a man of science, no doubt, a good mathematician; but he was in other respects of a middling understanding and violent feelings.’ ‘The lady treated him with kindness, apparently as a child; his friend Saint Lambert did not much relish the matter, being unable to adopt his singular habit of several lovers at one and the same time intimate with one mistress.’ The style of Rousseau’s Confessions, we are told, is ‘so exquisitely graphic without any effort, and so accommodated to its subject without any baseness, that there hardly exists another example of the miracles which composition can perform.’ In the labour of turning his heavy sentences, his lordship is sometimes oblivious of logic. Speaking of Johnson’s Latin verses to Mrs Thrale, he says: ‘Such offences as “Littera Skaiæ” (sic – a misprint, of course, for litora) for an Adonian in his Sapphics to “Thralia dulcis”, would have called down his severe censure on any luckless wight of Paris or Edinburgh who should peradventure have perpetrated them; nor would his being the countryman of Polignac or of by far the finest of modern Latinists, Buchanan, have operated except as an aggravation of the fault.’ Why should it?
Remembering Sydney Smith’s verdict on Scotch ‘wut’,4 we are not very much surprised to find that Lord Broughman has some anticipation of a Millennium when men will cease to perpetrate witticisms – when not only will the lion eat straw like the ox, but latter-day Voltaires will be as heavy as Scotch lawyers. At least, this is the only way in which we can interpret his peroration to the ‘Life of Voltaire’. After an allusion in the previous sentence to ‘the graces of his style’ and ‘the spirit of his immortal wit’, we read: ‘But if ever the time shall arrive when men, intent solely on graver matters, and bending their whole minds to things of solid importance, shall be careless of such light accomplishments, and the writings which now have so great a relish more or less openly tasted, shall pass into oblivion, then,’ etc., etc. We confess that we shudder at such a Millennium as much as at one predicted by Dr Cumming, or planned by Robert Owen.5
Another striking characteristic of these Lives of Men of Letters is the way in which the writer ignores what is not only notorious to all the educated world, but notoriously well known to Lord Brougham. The long-faced gravity with which he discourses on Voltaire’s ridicule of religious dogmas, and on Hume’s abstinence from such ridicule, might lead a very ignorant reader to suppose that Lord Broughman had led a retired life, chiefly in clerical and senile society, and could only with difficulty imagine a man passing a joke on the Trinity. He says of Hume that ‘occasionally his opinions were perceivable’ in his conversation, and that one day the inscription on the staircase of the college library, Christo et Musis has œdes sacrarunt cives Edinenses,6 actually ‘drew from the unbeliever an irreverent observation on the junction which the piety rather than the classical purity of the good town had made between the worship of the heathen and our own’. Astounding! Even this distant allusion to such irreverence might have had a pernicious effect by exciting in us an unhealthy desire to know what the irreverent observation was, had we not remembered that Hume had no wit, but only ‘wut’, so that his joke was probably a feeble one… A still more surprising example of Lord Brougham’s ignoring system as a writer is his comment on Voltaire’s relation to Madame du Châtelet. He thinks that on the whole there is no sufficient reason for questioning that it was Platonic, and the chief grounds he alleges for this conclusion are: that the laws of French society at that time, as well as now, were exceedingly rigorous, that the relation was recognized by all their friends, that Voltaire mentions Madame du Châtelet in his letters, and that Frederick II sent his regards to her! One would think it did not require Lord Brougham’s extensive acquaintance with the history of French society in the days of Voltaire and Rousseau to know that, whatever may be the truth of his conclusion, the grounds by which he supports it must sound like irony rather than like a grave statement of fact; and, indeed, he himself, – on another page, having laid aside his ignoring spectacles, talks of Grimm being the ‘professed lover of Madame d’Epinay’, and of Saint Lambert being ‘the avowed lover’ of Madame d’Houdetot.
We had marked several other points for notice, especially that very remarkable criticism of Lord Brougham’s on the Nouvelle Héloïse, in which he implies, that for a lover to remind his mistress that she had allowed him to kiss her, is to tell her what a ‘forward, abandoned wanton she proved’, and his supposition, that because Johnson was sometimes wandering all night in the streets with Savage, he must necessarily have indulged in certain vices ‘in their more crapulous form’ (an unfortunate suggestion to come from the Brougham of Jeffrey’s letters, who is described as ‘roaming the streets with the sons of Belial’). But we must remember that when indignation makes reviews instead of Juvenalian verses, the result is not equally enjoyable by the reader. So we restrain our noble rage, and say good bye now and for ever to Lord Brougham’s Lives of Men of Letters, hoping that the next time we meet with any production of his we may be able to express admiration as strongly as we have just now expressed the reverse.