Both his biographers labour to describe his power as a debater, but in truth there must have been something indescribable about it. 'As you heard him,' says Dr. Rainy, 'you were yourself working at the question, not with your own faculties, but with Cunningham's, and were possessed with the same intense moral perceptions.... This effect was due to the personality of the man put into his speech, to his intensity, and his vehemence.... The absence of all rhetoric, except that which sparkled red-hot from the forge at which the workman was labouring contributed to the same effect. To the same result conduced, and that very powerfully, his manifest scorn of foul play, and the manliness and fairness of his battle.' The testimony also is adduced of Mr. Murray Dunlop, late member for Greenock, who, after long experience both of the General Assembly and of Parliament, said, 'There is no man in the House of Commons that approaches to Cunningham.'
The disruption, to Cunningham and his associates, was a political defeat, but it was even more than a moral victory. It seems destined to secure the triumph of their principles in Scotland as it has powerfully helped to introduce them into Ireland. Now that a generation has passed away, we see the strange spectacle of the Scottish Establishment agitating for the abolition of patronage, and we hear her divines boasting of spiritual independence as if a satisfactory concordat on the matter had already been concluded with the State. Dread of another disruption is manifestly the only concordat that exists.
It was in the Chair of Historical Theology that Cunningham found his true sphere of continuous labour. As a lecturer, an examiner, a director of young men's studies, and a critic of their productions, he was unsurpassed in his time. Dr. Rainy considers that he was even superior to Chalmers in the power of producing the feeling of obligation in the minds of others. His own personal godliness, and his solicitude for the spiritual welfare of his students, showed itself quite spontaneously both in the classroom and out of it. Youths who trembled at coming under the jurisdiction of the great controversialist were delighted to find him in private intercourse as gentle as a lamb, and they yielded themselves all the more readily to the mastery of his influence. Hundreds of his old pupils are now in the ministry, scattered all over Scotland, and are to be found here and there in England, Ireland, America, and the colonies; and it may safely be said that few of them ever mention his name without affection and reverence.
Yet with all his gentleness of nature, Cunningham was a born controversialist. He was quite conscious of this himself. When a student of divinity, he said to a friend. 'If my life is spared, it will be spent in controversy, I believe;' and the event went far to justify the prediction. With true Christian magnanimity, he would at once apologise, and that in public, for unwarrantable expressions dropped in the heat of debate; and in one of his later tractates he says, 'We have some apprehension that the controversial spirit is rising and swelling in our breast, and therefore we abstain,' &c., as if he were applying the curb; but the temperament remained. Part of the last decade of his life was embittered by a controversy within the Free Church itself, which separated him for a time from some of his oldest and dearest friends, and made him the object of unwarrantable attacks on the part of others. His spirit was chastened and purified by the ordeal. In the beautiful record given by Dr. Rainy of his last days on earth, we read that two hours before his death he said, 'I am done with all controversies and all fightings now; I am at rest for ever.' Then raising his hand, he very emphatically said twice, 'From the rage of theologians, good Lord, deliver us.' Thus adopting one of the dying sayings of the gentle Melancthon.
After his death, Dr. Cunningham's literary executors published two large volumes of his lectures on 'Historical Theology,' and two additional volumes of his 'Essays and Reviews'—the one on the 'Reformers and their Doctrines,' the other on 'Church Principles.' These works are no unworthy monument of his vast learning, of his logical power, and of the depth of his own convictions. Dr. Rainy, in the volume before us, has very ably explained and defended Cunningham's method of teaching theology and the history of dogma, but we wish he had descended more into particulars, showing the growth of Cunningham's own mind as a theologian, and the comparative importance assigned by him to certain truths and views of truth at an earlier and a later period of his life. It is somewhat unsatisfactory to be told that on visiting Oxford in his later years Cunningham said musingly to a friend, 'I am more of a bigot and more of a latitudinarian than I used to be.'
Journals kept in France and Italy from 1848–1852; with a Sketch of the Revolution of 1848. By the late Nassau William Senior. Edited by his Daughter, M. C. M. Simpson. 2 vols. Henry S. King and Co.
Mr. Senior's journals suggest some curious speculations concerning the writer, and the order of literati to which he belongs; and they are a contemporary record of some facts which may be regarded as a contribution to history, and of some speculations which, after twenty years, it is interesting to test by events. Mr. Senior apparently aspired to a distinguished place in the class of writers more prominent in French literature than in English, who contribute, for the use of the historian and for the gratification of the gossip, mémoires pour servir. With considerable literary ability, he contributed essays to the Edinburgh and other reviews, two or three series of which have been published. He wrote a treatise on political economy, which evinced considerable power of philosophical thinking, and considerable knowledge of economical science, but which fell just short of classical authority. He was a Master in Chancery, and a well-informed man of the world. He had an extensive acquaintance with literati and politicians, which he sedulously cultivated. Probably, had he chosen to concentrate his intellectual powers and to subordinate his general knowledge, he might have produced works which would have taken an honourable and permanent place in literature. But the difficulty we feel in saying in what department of thought he would have succeeded the best, indicates the versatility which made him a clever man, and hindered him from becoming a profound one. He belonged to the literary class of which, perhaps, Southey may be regarded as facile princeps. Probably a man does best when he follows spontaneously his own literary instinct; and Mr. Senior, in becoming a very able chronicler and critic of the opinions of others, has avoided the fate of a second-rate publicist. It is difficult to find an exact type that may represent his special function and quality. His work is the work of a Boswell, only generally applied, and done with far more intellectual power, but at the cost of that exactness of record which is Boswell's great charm. All Mr. Senior's reports of the opinions and conversations of others are reproduced in his own mould of thought. Although he had apparently that peculiar kind of very bad memory which forgets nothing, yet clearly he does not reproduce the ipsissima verba of the interlocutors: while their sentiments are exactly conveyed, it is a version 'according to Mr. Senior.' One thinks again of Crabbe Robinson. What he was in a more literary and limited sphere, Mr. Senior was in his wider sphere of statesmen, diplomatists, and politicians. Mr. Senior's methods remind us of the 'interviewing' of American reporters. A highly gifted, well-informed, agreeable, and brilliant man, he was a welcome addition to every society. Princes, statesmen, and political leaders found pleasure in his conversation, and in the information concerning English opinion and feeling that he was able to impart. He assiduously prepared himself for making the most of his opportunities. He sought introductions wherever he went, and had the rare faculty of using them to the greatest advantage. Clearly, he knew how to put questions without being intrusive, how to conciliate sympathies without offensive toadyism, and how to make his note-taking purpose well understood without loss of dignity, and apparently—but of this we are not quite sure—without either shutting up his informants, or making them talk with a view to the record. He has aimed at whatever degree of literary renown attaches to men like Beaumarchais, De Grammont, and Pepys, and he will probably be quoted as a witness to contemporary facts and opinions when he is remembered for nothing else. It is not everyone who could submit to the conditions of such a function, or who could be successful in it. Mr. Senior's success is almost perfect. He is not a describer of men and manners—he has neither dramatic nor pictorial faculty; he is simply a chronicler of contemporary opinions. The value of his book, therefore, depends primarily upon the character of those to whom he had access. In this it leaves little to be desired. These journals kept in France and Italy are rich in the affirmations and opinions of the leading personages in these countries—of men who were chiefly making their history. It is impossible even to attempt an enumeration of the illustrious men with whom Mr. Senior freely conversed. The editor of his journals is so embarrassed by their riches, that he not only suppresses all mere travellers' impressions, observations, and descriptions, but reserves for separate publication the conversations with De Tocqueville, with whom Mr. Senior was on intimate terms. This, we think, however interesting as a contribution to the biography of De Tocqueville, is very injurious to the historic value of the journals. An account of the Revolution of 1848 and of the coup d'état of 1852, which chronicles the opinions of men like De Beaumont, Fauchet, Dunoyer, Gioberti, Circourt, and Horace Say, and systematically omits those of De Tocqueville, the greatest political philosopher among them all, is surely Hamlet with the part of the Prince omitted. Better have omitted the Italian journal, and have presented complete the opinions of French events which he was able to gather.
Nevertheless, the journals are remarkably rich in both incident and opinions, which, as communicated by political leaders themselves, may be implicitly accepted as authentic. Perhaps the thing that will chiefly strike the reader is the singular lack of political prevision which characterizes the forecasts of even the ablest statesmen. The surprise and violence of revolutionary incident probably disorder the faculty of the political philosopher, as well as disarrange the ordinary sequence of things. Whatever the cause, save in things palpable to ordinary thoughtfulness, few of the anticipations of statesmen here recorded have been verified. We have noted some dozens of instances of political sagacity utterly at fault, which justify this general remark, but our space forbids us to cite them.
Mr. Senior's journals in France begin about three months after the abdication of Louis Philippe; but he gathers up a tolerably complete account of the circumstances attending it, and of the opinions formed concerning it. A letter of General Bergeaud gives a military account of the overthrow of the constitutional throne, and attributes it to defective military preparations, and to vacillating purposes:—'If I had had the command a fortnight before, things might have passed differently.' True! but would that have secured respect for the time-serving king, or have given high-mindedness and dignity to the shuffling policy of his time-serving minister? Of what advantage would it have been to avert the revolution of February, if its provocatives had been left to gather afresh? This policy of expedients has been the ruin of the French nation; as De Beaumont justly said to Mr. Senior—'In France we are not good balancers of inconveniences. Nous sommes trop logiques. As soon as we see the faults of an institution, nous la brisons. In England you calculate, we act upon impulse.'
Mr. Senior throws much interesting light upon the conduct and motives of Lamartine in his brilliant and meteoric career, equally sudden in its kindling and its extinction;—possible, surely, only in France. De Beaumont seems to us to do more justice to Lamartine than Mr. Senior himself does. 'He thinks that Lamartine has managed foreign affairs honestly and ably, with an earnest wish for peace, but that the rest of his conduct has been vain, selfish, and timid. Ten days ago he would have been elected President by acclamation, now he would be chosen only to keep out somebody worse.' Whatever Lamartine's vanity and weakness, he must, we think, have credit for patriotic purpose. A mere selfish man would surely have pressed his enormous advantage very differently.