Mr. Brougham is, I conceive, another instance of this analytical style of debating, which ‘plays round the head, but does not reach the heart.’ There is a want of warmth, of momentum, of impulse in his speeches. He loses himself in an infinity of details, as his learned and honourable friend does in a wide sea of speculation. He goes picking up a number of curious pebbles on the shore, and at the outlets of a question—but he does not ‘roll all his strength and all his sharpness up into one ball,’ to throw at and crush his enemies beneath his feet. He enters into statistics, he calls for documents, he examines accounts. This method is slow, perplexing, circuitous, and not sure. While the evidence is collecting, the question is lost. While one thing is substantiating, another goes out of your mind. These little detached multifarious particulars, which require such industry and sagacity in the speaker to bring them forward, have no clue in the minds of the hearers to connect them together. There is no substratum of prejudice, no cement of interest. They do not grow out of the soil of common feeling and experience, but are set in it; nor do they bear the fruits of conviction. Mr. Brougham can follow the ramifications of an intricate subject, but he is not so well acquainted with the springs of the human mind. He finds himself at the end of his speech,—in the last sentence of it,—just where he was at the beginning, or in any other given part of it. He has not acquired any additional impetus, is not projected forward with any new degree of warmth or vigour. He was cold, correct, smart, pointed at first, and he continues so still. A repetition of blows, however, is of no use, unless they are struck in the same place: a change of position is not progression. As Sir James Mackintosh’s speeches are a decomposition of the moral principles of society, so Mr. Brougham’s are an ingenious taking in pieces of its physical mechanism. While they are at work with their experiments, their antagonists are putting in motion the passions, the fears, and antipathies of mankind, and blowing their schemes of reform above the moon.
Talent alone, then, is not sufficient to support a successful Opposition. There is talent on the other side too, of some sort or other; and, in addition, there is another weight, that of influence, which requires a counterpoise. This can be nothing else but fixed principle, but naked honesty, but undisguised enthusiasm. That is the expansive force that must shatter the strongholds of corruption if ever they are shattered, that must make them totter, if ever they are made to totter, about the heads of their possessors. Desire to expose a ministry, and you will do it—if it be, like ours, vulnerable all over. Desire to make a display of yourself, and you will do it, if you have a decent stock of acquirements. Mr. Brougham has a great quantity of combustible materials constantly passing through his hands, but he has not the warmth in his own heart to ‘kindle them into a flame of sacred vehemence.’ He is not a good hater. He is not an impassioned lover of the popular cause. He is not a Radical orator: he is not a Back-bone debater. He wants nerve, he wants impetuosity. He may divide on a question, but he will never carry it. His circumspection, which he thinks his strength, is in reality his weakness. He makes paltry excuses, unmanly concessions. His political warfare is not a bellum internecinum. He commits no mortal offences. He has not yet cut off his retreat. In a word, he trims too much between all parties. A person who does this too long, loses the confidence, loses the cordiality of all parties; loses his character; and when he has once lost that, there is nothing to stand in his way to office and the first honours of the State!
He who is not indifferent himself will find out, from his own feelings, what it is that interests others in a cause. An honest man is an orator by nature. The late Mr. Whitbread was an honest man, and a true parliamentary speaker. He had no artifices, no tricks, no reserve about him. He spoke point-blank what he thought, and his heart was in his broad, honest, English face. He had as much activity of mind as Mr. Brougham, and paid the same attention to business as that gentleman does; but it was with him a matter of feeling, and had nothing of a professional look. His objects were open and direct; and he had a sufficient stock of natural good sense and practical information, not to be made the dupe of sophistry and chicane. He was always in his place, and ready to do his duty. If a falsehood was stated, he contradicted it instantly in a few plain words: if an act of injustice was palliated, it excited his contempt; if it was justified, it roused his indignation: he retorted a mean insinuation with manly spirit, and never shrunk from a frank avowal of his sentiments. He presented a petition or complaint against some particular grievance better than any one else I ever saw. His manner seemed neither to implicate him in the truth of the charge, nor to signify a wish to disclaim it beforehand. He was merely the organ through which any alleged abuse of power might meet the public ear, and he either answered or redressed, according to the merits of the case upon inquiry. In short, he was the representative of the spontaneous, unsophisticated sense of the English people on public men and public measures. Any plain, well-meaning man, on hearing him speak, would say, ‘That is just what I think’; or from observing his manner, would say, ‘That is just what I feel.’ He was not otherwise a powerful debater or an accomplished speaker. He could not master a general view of any subject, or get up a set speech with effect. One or two that I heard him make (particularly one on the Princess of Wales and the situation of her affairs in 1813, in which he grew pathetic) were complete failures. He could pull down better than he could build up. The irritation of constant contradiction was necessary to his full possession of himself:—give him ‘ample scope and verge enough,’ and he lost his way. He stuck close to the skirts of Ministry, but he was not qualified to originate or bring to a triumphant conclusion any great political movement. His enthusiasm ran away with his judgment, and was not backed by equal powers of reasoning or imagination. He was a sanguine, high-spirited man, but not a man of genius, or a deep thinker; and his fortitude failed him, when the last fatal blow was given to himself and his party. He could not have drawn up so able a political statement as Mr. Brougham; but he would have more personal adherents in the House of Commons, for he was himself the adherent of a cause.
Mr. Tierney is certainly a better speaker and a cleverer man. But he can never make a leader for want of earnestness. He has no Quixotic enthusiasm in himself; much less any to spare for his followers. He cares nothing (or seems to care nothing) about a question; but he is impatient of absurdity, and has a thorough contempt for the understandings of his opponents. Sharpened by his spleen, nothing escapes his acuteness. He makes fine sport for the spectators. He takes up Lord Castlereagh’s blunders, and Mr. Vansittart’s no-meanings; and retorts them on their heads in the finest style of execution imaginable. It is like being present on a Shrove-Tuesday, and seeing a set of mischievous unfeeling boys throwing at a brace of cocks, and breaking their shins. Mr. Tierney always brings down his man: but beyond this you feel no confidence in him; you take no interest in his movements but as he is instrumental in annoying other people. He (to all appearance) has no great point to carry himself, and no wish to be thought to have any important principle at stake. He is by much too sincere for a hypocrite, but is not enough in earnest for a parliamentary leader. For others to sympathise with you, you must first sympathise with them. When Mr. Whitbread got up to speak, you felt an interest in what he was going to say, in the success of his arguments: when you hear that Mr. Tierney is on his legs, you feel that you shall be amused with an admirable display of dexterity and talent, but are nearly indifferent as to the result. You look on as at an exhibition of extraordinary skill in fencing or prize-fighting.
Of all those who have for some years past aspired by turns to be leaders of the Opposition, Mr. Ponsonby was the person who had the fewest pretensions. He was a literal arguer. He affected great sagacity and judgment, and referred every thing, in a summary way, to the principles of common sense, and the reason of the case. He abounded in truisms, which seldom go far in deciding disputable points. He generally reduced the whole range of the debate into the narrow compass of a self-evident proposition:—to make sure of his object, he began by taking the question for granted, and necessarily failed when he came to the particular application. He was not aware of the maxim, that he who proves too much, proves nothing. His turn of observation was legal, not acute: his manner was dry, but his blows were not hard: his features were flat on his face, and his arguments did not stand out from the question. He might have been a tolerable special-pleader, but he was a bad orator, and, I think, a worse politician. Any one who argues on strict logical grounds must be prepared to go all lengths, or he will be sure to be defeated at every step he takes: but the gentleman’s principles were of a very cautious and temporising cast. I have seen him, more than once, give himself great airs over those who took more general views of the subject; and he was very fastidious in the choice of associates, with whom he would condescend to act.
Mr. Ponsonby’s style of speaking was neither instructive nor entertaining. In this respect, it was the reverse of Mr. Grattan’s, which was both. To see the latter make one of his promised motions on Catholic Emancipation, was one of the most extraordinary exhibitions, both bodily and mental, which could possibly be witnessed. You saw a little oddly-compacted figure of a man, with a large head and features,—such as they give to pasteboard masks, or stick upon the shoulders of Punch in the puppet-show,—rolling about like a Mandarin—sawing the air with his whole body from head to foot, sweeping the floor with a roll of parchment, which he held in one hand, and throwing his legs and arms about like the branches of trees tossed by the wind:—every now and then striking the table with impatient vehemence, and, in a sharp, slow, nasal, gutteral tone, drawling out, with due emphasis and discretion, a set of little smart antithetical sentences,—all ready-cut and dry, polished and pointed;—that seemed as if they ‘would lengthen out in succession to the crack of doom.’ Alliterations were tacked to alliterations,—inference was dove-tailed into inference,—and the whole derived new brilliance and piquancy from the contrast it presented to the uncouthness of the speaker, and the monotony of his delivery. His were compositions that would have done equally well to be said or sung. The rhyme was placed at the beginning instead of the end of each line; he sharpened the sense on the sound, and clenched an argument by corresponding letters of the alphabet. It must be confessed, that there was something meretricious, as well as alluring, in this style. After the first surprise and startling effect is over, and the devoted champion of his country’s cause goes on ringing the changes on ‘the Irish People and the Irish Parliament’—on ‘the Guinea and the Gallows,’ as the ultimate resources of the English government,—on ‘ministerial mismanagement, and privileged profligacy,’—we begin to feel that there is nothing in these quaint and affected verbal coincidences more nearly allied to truth than falsehood:—there is a want of directness and simplicity in this warped and garbled style; and our attention is drawn off from the importance of the subject by a shower of epigrammatic conceits, and fanciful phraseology, in which the orator chuses to veil it. It is hardly enough to say, in defence of this jingle of words, (as well as of the overstrained hyperbolical tone of declamation which accompanies it) that ‘it is a custom of Ireland.’[[55]] The same objection may be made to it in point of taste that has been made to the old-fashioned, obsolete practice of cutting trees into the shape of arm-chairs and peacocks, or to that style of landscape-gardening, where
‘Grove nods to grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other—’
and I am afraid that this objection cannot be got over, at least, on this side the water.[[56]]
The best Irish speaker I ever heard (indeed the best speaker without any exception whatever) is Mr. Plunkett; who followed Mr. Grattan in one of the debates on the Catholic question above alluded to. The contrast was not a little striking; and it was certainly in favour of Mr. Plunkett. His style of workmanship was more manly and more masterly. There were no little Gothic ornaments or fantastic excrescences to catch and break the attention: no quaintness, witticism, or conceit. Roubilliac, after being abroad, said, that ‘what he had seen there made his own work in Westminster Abbey look like tobacco-pipes.’ You had something of the same sort of feeling with respect to Mr. Grattan’s artificial and frittered style, after hearing Mr. Plunkett’s defence of the same side of the question. He went strait forward to his end with a force equal to his rapidity. He removed all obstacles, as he advanced. He overturned Mr. Banks with his right hand, and Mr. Charles Yorke with his left—the one on a chronological question of the Concordat, and the other as to the origin of the Corporation and Test Acts. One wonders how they ever got up again, or trusted themselves on a ground of matter-of-fact ever after. Mr. Secretary Peele did not offer to put himself in his way. No part of the subject could come amiss to him—history, law, constitutional principle, common feeling, local prejudices, general theory,—all was alike within his reach and his controul. Having settled one point, he passed on to another, carrying his hearers with him:—it was as if he knew all that could be said on the question, and was anxious to impart his knowledge without any desire of shining. There was no affectation, no effort, but equal ease and earnestness. Every thing was brought to bear that could answer his purpose, and there was nothing superfluous. His eloquence swept along like a river,