|
The Opinions of Lord Holland, as recorded in the journals of the House of Lords
from 1797 to 1841. Collected and edited by D. C. Moylan, of Lincoln's Inn,
Barrister-at-law. 8vo. London: 1841.
Many reasons make it impossible for us to lay before our readers, at the present
moment, a complete view of the character and public career of the late Lord
Holland. But we feel that we have already deferred too long the duty of paying
some tribute to his memory. We feel that it is more becoming to bring without
further delay an offering, though intrinsically of little value, than to leave
his tomb longer without some token of our reverence and love.
We shall say very little of the book which lies on our table. And yet it is a
book which, even if it had been the work of a less distinguished man, or had
appeared under circumstances less interesting, would have well repaid an
attentive perusal. It is valuable, both as a record of principles and as a model
of composition. We find in it all the great maxims which, during more than forty
years, guided Lord Holland's public conduct, and the chief reasons on which
those maxims rest, condensed into the smallest possible space, and set forth
with admirable perspicuity, dignity, and precision. To his opinions on Foreign
Policy we for the most part cordially assent; but now and then we are inclined
to think them imprudently generous. We could not have signed the protest against
the detention of Napoleon. The Protest respecting the course which England
pursued at the Congress of Verona, though it contains much that is excellent,
contains also positions which, we are inclined to think, Lord Holland would, at
a later period, have admitted to be unsound. But to all his doctrines on
constitutional questions, we give our hearty approbation; and we firmly believe
that no British Government has ever deviated from that line of internal policy
which he has traced, without detriment to the public.
We will give, as a specimen of this little volume, a single passage, in which a
chief article of the political creed of the Whigs is stated and explained, with
singular clearness, force, and brevity. Our readers will remember that, in 1825,
the Catholic Association raised the cry of emancipation with most formidable
effect. The Tories acted after their kind. Instead of removing the grievance
they tried to put down the agitation, and brought in a law, apparently sharp and
stringent, but in truth utterly impotent, for restraining the right of petition.
Lord Holland's Protest on that occasion is excellent:
"We are," says he, "well aware that the privileges of the people, the rights of
free discussion, and the spirit and letter of our popular institutions, must
render,--and they are intended to render,--the continuance of an extensive
grievance and of the dissatisfaction consequent thereupon, dangerous to the
tranquility of the country, and ultimately subversive of the authority of the
State. Experience and theory alike forbid us to deny that effect of a free
constitution; a sense of justice and a love of liberty equally deter us from
lamenting it. But we have always been taught to look for the remedy of such
disorders in the redress of the grievances which justify them, and in the
removal of the dissatisfaction from which they flow--not in restraints on
ancient privileges, not in inroads on the right of public discussion, nor in
violations of the principles of a free government. If, therefore, the legal
method of seeking redress, which has been resorted to by persons laboring under
grievous disabilities, be fraught with immediate or remote danger to the State,
we draw from that circumstance a conclusion long since foretold by great
authority--namely, that the British constitution, and large exclusions, cannot
subsist together; that the constitution must destroy them, or they will destroy
the constitution."
It was not, however, of this little book, valuable and interesting as it is, but
of the author, that we meant to speak; and we will try to do so with calmness
and impartiality.
In order to fully appreciate the character of Lord Holland, it is necessary to
go far back into the history of his family; for he had inherited something more
than a coronet and an estate. To the House of which he was the head belongs one
distinction which we believe to be without a parallel in our annals. During more
than a century, there has never been a time at which a Fox has not stood in a
prominent station among public men. Scarcely had the checkered career of the
first Lord Holland closed, when his son, Charles, rose to the head of the
Opposition, and to the first rank among English debaters. And before Charles was
borne to Westminster Abbey a third Fox had already become one of the most
conspicuous politicians in the kingdom.
It is impossible not to be struck by the strong family likeness which, in spite
of diversities arising from education and position, appears in these three
distinguished persons. In their faces and figures there was a resemblance, such
as is common enough in novels, where one picture is good for ten generations,
but such as in real life is seldom found. The ample person, the massy and
thoughtful forehead, the large eyebrows, the full cheek and lip, the expression,
so singularly compounded of sense, humor, courage, openness, a strong will and a
sweet temper, were common to all. But the features of the founder of the House,
as the pencil of Reynolds and the chisel of Nollekens have handed them down to
us, were disagreeably harsh and exaggerated. In his descendants, the aspect was
preserved, but it was softened, till it became, in the late lord, the most
gracious and interesting countenance that was ever lighted up by the mingled
luster of intelligence and benevolence.
As it was with the faces of the men of this noble family, so was it also with
their minds. Nature had done much for them all. She had molded them all of that
clay of which she is most sparing. To all she had given strong reason and sharp
wit, a quick relish for every physical and intellectual enjoyment,
constitutional intrepidity, and that frankness by which constitutional
intrepidity is generally accompanied, spirits which nothing could depress,
tempers easy, generous, and placable, and that genial courtesy which has its
seat in the heart, and of which artificial politeness is only a faint and cold
imitation. Such a disposition is the richest inheritance that ever was entailed
on any family.
But training and situation greatly modified the fine qualities which nature
lavished with such profusion on three generations of the house of Fox. The first
Lord Holland was a needy political adventurer. He entered public life at a time
when the standard of integrity among statesmen was low. He started as the
adherent of a minister who had indeed many titles to respect, who possessed
eminent talents both for administration and for debate, who understood the
public interest well, and who meant fairly by the country, but who had seen so
much perfidy and meanness that he had become skeptical as to the existence of
probity. Weary of the cant of patriotism, Walpole had learned to talk a cant of
a different kind. Disgusted by that sort of hypocrisy which is at least a homage
to virtue, he was too much in the habit of practicing the less respectable
hypocrisy which ostentatiously displays, and sometimes even simulates vice. To
Walpole Fox attached himself, politically and personally, with the ardor which
belonged to his temperament. And it is not to be denied that in the school of
Walpole he contracted faults which destroyed the value of his many great
endowments. He raised himself, indeed, to the first consideration in the House
of Commons; he became a consummate master of the art of debate; he attained
honors and immense wealth; but the public esteem and confidence were withheld
from him. His private friends, indeed, justly extolled his generosity and good
nature. They maintained that in those parts of his conduct which they could
least defend there was nothing sordid, and that, if he was misled, he was misled
by amiable feelings, by a desire to serve his friends, and by anxious tenderness
for his children. But by the nation he was regarded as a man of insatiable
rapacity and desperate ambition; as a man ready to adopt, without scruple, the
most immoral and the most unconstitutional manners; as a man perfectly fitted,
by all his opinions and feelings, for the work of managing the Parliament by
means of secret-service money, and of keeping down the people with the bayonet.
Many of his contemporaries had a morality quite as lax as his: but very few
among them had his talents, and none had his hardihood and energy. He could not,
like Sandys and Doddington, find safety in contempt. He therefore became an
object of such general aversion as no statesman since the fall of Strafford has
incurred, of such general aversion as was probably never in any country incurred
by a man of so kind and cordial a disposition. A weak mind would have sunk under
such a load of unpopularity. But that resolute spirit seemed to derive new
firmness from the public hatred. The only effect which reproaches appeared to
produce on him, was to sour, in some degree, his naturally sweet temper. The
last acts of his public life were marked, not only by that audacity which he had
derived from nature, not only by that immorality which he had learned in the
school of Walpole, but by a harshness which almost amounted to cruelty, and
which had never been supposed to belong to his character. His severity increased
the unpopularity from which it had sprung. The well-known lampoon of Gray may
serve as a specimen of the feeling of the country. All the images are taken from
shipwrecks, quicksands, and cormorants. Lord Holland is represented as
complaining, that the cowardice of his accomplices bad prevented him from
putting down the free spirit of the city of London by sword and fire, and as
pining for the time when birds of prey should make their nests in Westminster
Abbey, and unclean beasts burrow in St. Paul's.
Within a few months after the death of this remarkable man, his second son
Charles appeared at the head of the party opposed to the American War. Charles
had inherited the bodily and mental constitution of his father, and had been
much, far too much, under his father's influence. It was indeed impossible that
a son of so affectionate and noble a nature should not have been warmly attached
to a parent who possessed many fine qualities, and who carried his indulgence
and liberality towards his children even to a culpable extent. Charles saw that
the person to whom he was bound by the strongest ties was, in the highest
degree, odious to the nation; and the effect was what might have been expected
from the strong passions and constitutional boldness of so high-spirited a
youth. He cast in his lot with his father, and took, while still a boy, a deep
part in the most unjustifiable and unpopular measures that had been adopted
since the reign of James the Second. In the debates on the Middlesex Election,
he distinguished himself, not only by his precocious powers of eloquence, but by
the vehement and scornful manner in which he bade defiance to public opinion. He
was at that time regarded as a man likely to be the most formidable champion of
arbitrary government that had appeared since the Revolution, to be a Bute with
far greater powers, a Mansfield with far greater courage. Happily his father's
death liberated him early from the pernicious influence by which he had been
misled. His mind expanded. His range of observation became wider. His genius
broke through early prejudices. His natural benevolence and magnanimity had fair
play. In a very short time he appeared in a situation worthy of his
understanding and of his heart. From a family whose name was associated in the
public mind with tyranny and corruption, from a party of which the theory and
the practice were equally servile, from the midst of the Luttrells, the Dysons,
the Barringtons, came forth the greatest parliamentary defender of civil and
religious liberty.
The late Lord Holland succeeded to the talents and to the fine natural
dispositions of his House. But his situation was very different from that of the
two eminent men of whom we have spoken. In some important respects it was
better, in some it was worse than theirs. He had one great advantage over them.
He received a good political education. The first lord was educated by Sir
Robert Walpole. Mr. Fox was educated by his father. The late lord was educated
by Mr. Fox. The pernicious maxims early imbibed by the first Lord Holland, made
his great talents useless and worse than useless to the State. The pernicious
maxims early imbibed by Mr. Fox, led him, at the commencement of his public
life, into great faults which, though afterwards nobly expiated, were never
forgotten. To the very end of his career, small men, when they had nothing else
to say in defense of their own tyranny, bigotry, and imbecility, could always
raise a cheer by some paltry taunt about the election of Colonel Luttrell, the
imprisonment of the lord mayor, and other measures in which the great Whig
leader had borne a part at the age of one or two and twenty. On Lord Holland no
such slur could be thrown. Those who most dissent from his opinions must
acknowledge that a public life more consistent is not to be found in our annals.
Every part of it is in perfect harmony with every other part; and the whole is
in perfect harmony with the great principles of toleration and civil freedom.
This rare felicity is in a great measure to be attributed to the influence of
Mr. Fox. Lord Holland, as was natural in a person of his talents and
expectations, began at a very early age to take the keenest interest in
politics; and Mr. Fox found the greatest pleasure in forming the mind of so
hopeful a pupil. They corresponded largely on political subjects when the young
lord was only sixteen; and their friendship and mutual confidence continued to
the day of that mournful separation at Chiswick. Under such training such a man
as Lord Holland was in no danger of falling into those faults which threw a dark
shade over the whole career of his grandfather, and from which the youth of his
uncle was not wholly free.
On the other hand, the late Lord Holland, as compared with his grandfather and
his uncle, labored under one great disadvantage. They were members of the House
of Commons. He became a Peer while still an infant. When he entered public life,
the House of Lords was a very small and a very decorous assembly. The minority
to which he belonged was scarcely able to muster five or six votes on the most
important nights, when eighty or ninety lords were present. Debate had
accordingly become a mere form, as it was in the Irish House of Peers before the
Union. This was a great misfortune to a man like Lord Holland. It was not by
occasionally addressing fifteen or twenty solemn and unfriendly auditors that
his grandfather and his uncle attained their unrivalled parliamentary skill. The
former had learned his art in "the great Walpolean battles," on nights when
Onslow was in the chair seventeen hours without intermission, when the thick
ranks on both sides kept unbroken order till long after the winter sun had risen
upon them, when the blind were led out by the hand into the lobby and the
paralytic laid down in their bed-clothes on the benches. The powers of Charles
Fox were, from the first, exercised in conflicts not less exciting. The great
talents of the late Lord Holland had no such advantage. This was the more
unfortunate, because the peculiar species of eloquence which belonged to him in
common with his family required much practice to develop it. With strong sense,
and the greatest readiness of wit, a certain tendency to hesitation was
hereditary in the line of Fox. This hesitation arose, not from the poverty, but
from the wealth of their vocabulary. They paused, not from the difficulty of
finding one expression, but from the difficulty of choosing between several. It
was only by slow degrees and constant exercise that the first Lord Holland and
his son overcame the defect. Indeed neither of them overcame it completely.
In statement, the late Lord Holland was not successful; his chief excellence lay
in reply. He had the quick eye of his house for the unsound parts of an
argument, and a great felicity in exposing them. He was decidedly more
distinguished in debate than any peer of his time who had not sat in the House
of Commons. Nay, to find his equal among persons similarly situated, we must go
back eighty years to Earl Granville. For Mansfield, Thurlow, Loughborough, Grey,
Grenville, Brougham, Plunkett, and other eminent men, living and dead, whom we
will not stop to enumerate, carried to the Upper House an eloquence formed and
matured in the Lower. The opinion of the most discerning judges was that Lord
Holland's oratorical performances, though sometimes most successful, afforded no
fair measure of his oratorical powers, and that, in an assembly of which the
debates were frequent and animated, he would have attained a very high order of
excellence. It was, indeed, impossible to listen to his conversation without
seeing that he was born a debater. To him, as to his uncle, the exercise of the
mind in discussion was a positive pleasure. With the greatest good nature and
good breeding, he was the very opposite to an assenter. The word "disputatious"
is generally used as a word of reproach; but we can express our meaning only by
saying that Lord Holland was most courteously and pleasantly disputatious. In
truth, his quickness in discovering and apprehending distinctions and analogies
was such as a veteran judge might envy. The lawyers of the Duchy of Lancaster
were astonished to find in an unprofessional man so strong a relish for the
esoteric parts of their science, and complained that as soon as they had split a
hair, Lord Holland proceeded to split the filaments into filaments still finer.
In a mind less happily constituted, there might have been a risk that this turn
for subtlety would have produced serious evil. But in the heart and
understanding of Lord Holland there was ample security against all such danger.
He was not a man to be the dupe of his own ingenuity. He put his logic to its
proper use; and in him the dialectician was always subordinate to the statesman.
His political life is written in the chronicles of his country. Perhaps, as we
have already intimated, his opinions on two or three great questions of foreign
policy were open to just objection. Yet even his errors, if he erred, were
amiable and respectable. We are not sure that we do not love and admire him the
more because he was now and then seduced from what we regard as a wise policy by
sympathy with the oppressed, by generosity towards the fallen, by a philanthropy
so enlarged that it took in all nations, by love of peace, a love which in him
was second only to the love of freedom, and by the magnanimous credulity of a
mind which was as incapable of suspecting as of devising mischief.
To his views on questions of domestic policy the voice of his countrymen does
ample justice. They revere the memory of the man who was, during forty years,
the constant protector of all oppressed races and persecuted sects, of the man
whom neither the prejudices nor the interests belonging to his station could
seduce from the path of right, of the noble, who in every great crisis cast in
his lot with the commons, of the planter, who made manful war on the slave-trade
of the landowner, whose whole heart was in the struggle against the corn-laws.
We have hitherto touched almost exclusively on those parts of Lord Holland's
character which were open to the observation of millions. How shall we express
the feelings with which his memory is cherished by those who were honored with
his friendship? Or in what language shall we speak of that house, once
celebrated for its rare attractions to the furthest ends of the civilized world,
and now silent and desolate as the grave? To that house, a hundred and twenty
years ago, a poet addressed those tender and graceful lines, which have now
acquired a new meaning not less sad than that which they originally bore:
"Thou hill, whose brow the antique structures grace, Reared by bold chiefs of
Warwick's noble race, Why, once so loved, whene'er thy bower appears, O'er my
dim eyeballs glance the sudden tears? How sweet were once thy prospects fresh
and fair, Thy sloping walks and unpolluted air! How sweet the glooms beneath
thine aged trees, Thy noon-tide shadow and thine evening breeze His image thy
forsaken bowers restore; Thy walks and airy prospects charm no more No more the
summer in thy glooms allayed, Thine evening breezes, and thy noon-day shade."
Yet a few years, and the shades and structures may follow their illustrious
masters. The wonderful city which, ancient and gigantic as it is, still
continues to grow as fast as a young town of logwood by a water-privilege in
Michigan, may soon displace those turrets and gardens which are associated with
so much that is interesting and noble, with the courtly magnificence of Rich
with the loves of Ormond, with the counsels of Cromwell, with the death of
Addison. The time is coming when, perhaps, a few old men, the last survivors of
our generation, will in vain seek, amidst new streets, and squares, and railway
stations, for the site of that dwelling which was in their youth the favorite
resort of wits and beauties, of painters and poets, of scholars, philosophers,
and statesmen. They will then remember, with strange tenderness, many objects
once familiar to them, the avenue and the terrace, the busts and the paintings,
the carving, the grotesque gilding, and the enigmatical mottoes. With peculiar
fondness they will recall that venerable chamber, in which all the antique
gravity of a college library was so singularly blended with all that female
grace and wit could devise to embellish a drawing-room. They will recollect, not
unmoved, those shelves loaded with the varied learning of many lands and many
ages, and those portraits in which were preserved the features of the best and
wisest Englishmen of two generations. They will recollect how many men who have
guided the politics of Europe, who have moved great assemblies by reason and
eloquence, who have put life into bronze and canvas, or who have left to
posterity things so written as it shall not willingly let them die, were there
mixed with all that was loveliest and gayest in the society of the most splendid
of capitals. They will remember the peculiar character which belonged to that
circle, in which every talent and accomplishment, every art and science, had its
place. They will remember how the last debate was discussed in one corner, and
the last comedy of Scribe in another; while Wilkie gazed with modest admiration
on Sir Joshua's Baretti; while Mackintosh turned over Thomas Aquinas to verify a
quotation; while Talleyrand related his conversations with Barras at the
Luxembourg, or his ride with Lannes over the field of Austerlitz. They will
remember, above all, the grace, and the kindness, far more admirable than grace,
with which the princely hospitality of that ancient mansion was dispensed. They
will remember the venerable and benignant countenance and the cordial voice of
him who bade them welcome. They will remember that temper which years of pain,
of sickness, of lameness, of confinement, seemed only to make sweeter and
sweeter, and that frank politeness, which at once relieved all the embarrassment
of the youngest and most timid writer or artist, who found himself for the first
time among Ambassadors and Earls. They will remember that constant flow of
conversation, so natural, so animated, so various, so rich with observation and
anecdote; that wit which never gave a wound; that exquisite mimicry which
ennobled, instead of degrading; that goodness of heart which appeared in every
look and accent, and gave additional value to every talent and acquirement. They
will remember, too, that he whose name they hold in reverence was not less
distinguished by the inflexible uprightness of his political conduct than by his
loving disposition and his winning manners. They will remember that, in the last
lines which he traced, he expressed his joy that he had done nothing unworthy of
the friend of Fox and Grey; and they will have reason to feel similar joy, if,
in looking back on many troubled years, they cannot accuse themselves of having
done anything unworthy of men who were distinguished by the friendship of Lord
Holland.
Previous |
Critical and Historical Essays, Volume I
| Next
Critical And Historical Essays, Volume I, Thomas Babbington Macaulay,
1843 |
|
Add/Correct a Link