And to his last days, he never learned the sordid lessons of prudent conformity even where they might have meant a serious lightening of his burdens. Once in the last year of his life, I commented jestingly, as laying down the code of commercial journalism, or his devotion of columns of his journal to dry details of the Indian grievances he took up, when he might have raised the circulation by lampooning his fellow-members. He felt so strongly on the subject of English disregard of Indian claims that even the jest disturbed him, and he met it with an Et tu, Brute. No man was saner in the adjustment of a necessary compromise in legislation; but no man was ever more innocent of the spirit of Nothingarianism. "Good God, Bradlaugh," said a friendly Conservative member to him one day, reproaching him for his quixotry, "what does it matter whether there is a God or not?" The amiable indifferentists who subscribe to that philosophy, though they may have been able to appreciate him as a companion, will never be able to understand the enthusiasm which Bradlaugh aroused in thousands of those who followed him, and even in some whose way of thought diverged far from his. I have heard of one eminent professional man who long wore Bradlaugh's portrait next his breast, and long hesitated between following him and turning Catholic. Men who never had any leanings that way could the more heartily give their devotion. Certain it is that Bradlaugh evoked a passion of love and loyalty from thousands, such as no other public man of his day called forth. His followers followed him as Nelson's men did Nelson. Mr Gladstone has the enthusiastic reverence of myriads; but men who would go through fire and water for their leader, and give up their tobacco to send him a weekly sixpence, were to be looked for rather in Bradlaugh's following than his.
Men turned instinctively to Bradlaugh as to a born leader. Had any great social convulsion arisen in his time, such as some foretell for the near future, he would infallibly have come to the front as none of his political contemporaries were fitted to do—as Cromwell did and as Danton did. In him the faculty of action was not limited to the sphere of the forum and the bureau. It has been told[194] how, when in Spain, he offered to the Republican leaders to go with fifty horsemen and shoot the traitorous general in the north; and we may safely hold with the narrator of this episode that "he would have done it" had the offer been accepted. Among the many adventures of his younger days, the details of which will probably never now be put together, was a singular attempt in which he took part to secure the election of a Liberal Pope. He carried letters to and fro in Europe on behalf of Italian and other democrats who had conceived the scheme. All I learned from him was the fact of his positively taking part in the enterprise, which, of course, failed. In these and other journeys he ran many risks; and he told a funny story of how, travelling one night in a German train with a good deal of money in his possession, and being awakened from his sleep, with the train at full speed, by the conductor's lamp presented to his face, after the continental fashion, where on his lying down there had been no one else in the compartment, he in an instant had that startling and startled functionary by the throat in the opposite corner of the carriage. His army training and his later experiences had developed in him a remarkable turn for dealing promptly with physical emergencies; and persons who sought, in the old days, to block the "Reform" processions for the leading of which he was responsible, came to swift and serious confusion. To the last he had in him something of Cromwell's Berserker temper, though at his blood's hottest he could never have been guilty of the Puritan's ferocity. It came out in him in such acts as his personal seizure and expulsion of rowdies from his meetings. I saw him effect this dramatically enough at one of the great St James's Hall meetings he organised about 1886. Tories had come with forged tickets, but were detected and ejected; and these, or others, determined to give due trouble, took the course of keeping up a loud and distracting tapping on the glass door at the off end of one of the balconies. The disturbers being in great force outside, the doorkeepers were helpless; the loud click-click was disconcerting the speaker then on his feet; and the audience were growing more and more irritated and restless. Bradlaugh left the chair, passed down and then up to the balcony, made his way along to the door, opened it sharply and disappeared, but in a moment re-entered, holding a man by the collar. This was the ringleader with the stick. Startled at the apparition of Bradlaugh, he had involuntarily raised that weapon; but in a flash it was out of his hands and broken across Bradlaugh's knee. The pale disturber was then taken by his captor—still by the collar—along the crowded balcony to the platform end, where he was ejected by the other doorway. He did not return: his followers broke up; and the meeting proceeded in peace, after a spontaneous expression of its satisfaction at the manner of the relief. That there was nobody like Bradlaugh for an awkward emergency, was the fresh verdict of his followers.
And these things, and his shaping of his life, were all of a piece with the extraordinary effectiveness of his oratory. In tempestuous power and intensity of feeling it surpassed any that it has ever been my lot to listen to: it roused men to great thrills of sympathy apart from any of that foregone approbation which swells the cheering for so many political leaders. He could make enthusiastic followers at one hearing, and keep them for a generation. Oratory was with him not an art, but an inspiration; he even misused his wonderfully powerful voice; but he sounded easily all the notes of eloquence, giving at times the whole gamut of effect, jest, pathos, gravity, reasoning, epigram, and thunderous vehemence, in a quarter of an hour's speech. The platform was pre-eminently his place; and no one who merely reads his articles written for reading, tersely strong as his style generally is, can know the extent of his power over language. It did not lie in any special sonority of vocabulary or choice of cadence, but in a volcanic sincerity and spontaneous fire of speech which yet never passed beyond the control of logic and judgment—something equally removed from the measured passion and forceful dignity of Bright, and the copious mellifluence of Gladstone. It was the oratory of unswerving conviction, grave or impassioned or satirical in turn, but always felt and never factitious. He spoke as he lived and fought, going straight for his mark, and staking all on the issue.
To those whom his career leaves cold and whom his character cannot attract, it is enough to say that those who applaud the career and honour the character recognise in them, in their special kind, that invincible and unforgettable something which marks men for remembrance long after their immediate influence has passed away—the something which in artists and poets and warriors we call genius. What Mr John Morley has called the dæmonic elements of character, but may perhaps better be called the dynamic elements, were present in Bradlaugh in a degree which gives a personality a lasting interest. Beside the cautious and merely judicious or clever men, he stands out as one of larger mould and greater fibre, a battling and conquering Titan, sure of the sympathetic retrospect of happier days. It is not merely that as a statesman he impressed friends and foes alike with his insight and his sagacity; and that he combined the fire of the orator with the exactitude of the scholar and the rigorous thinking of the born reasoner; but that in him sagacity never ceased to be heroic, and that his commanding powers rested on a character more commanding still. When, in September 1892, twenty months after his death, a gathering was held in his memory on the occasion of the completion of the bust for his grave, the enthusiasm was as strong, the throng as dense, the tributes as warm, the sympathy as keen, as on the day he was struck down. His name is verily not written in water. And the bronze bust on his tomb, recalling as it does the high front and the unflinching eye which his friends loved to associate with him, and seeming as it does to face fate with an immovable strength and firmness, will for many a year say to passers-by what has been sought to be told in these pages—"This was a man."
THE END.
[APPENDICES]
APPENDIX I.