Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more.’
He would go with the popular cause as long as it was popular, and gave him more weight than he lost by it; but would desert it the instant it became obnoxious, and that an obstinate adherence to it was likely to deprive him of future opportunities of doing good. He had rather be on the right side than the wrong, if he loses nothing by it. His reputation costs him nothing; though he always takes care to save appearances. His virtues compound for his vices in a very amicable manner. His humanity is at the horizon, three thousand miles off,—his servility stays at home, at the beck of the minister. He unbinds the chains of Africa, and helps (we trust without meaning it) to rivet those of his own country, and of Europe. As a general truth,—(not meaning any undue application in the present instance,) it may be affirmed, that there is not a more insignificant as well as a dangerous character crawling between heaven and earth, than that of the pretended patriot, and philanthropist, who has not courage to take the plain reward of vice or virtue—who crouches to authority, and yet dreads the censure of the world, who gives a sneaking casting vote on the side of conscience only when he can do it with impunity,—or else throws the weight of his reputation into the scale of his interest and the profligacy of others—who makes an affectation of principle a stalking-horse to his pitiful desire of distinction, and betrays a cause, sooner than commit himself.
‘Out upon such half-faced fellowship.’ We have another example of trumpery ambition in the person of Mr. C. Wynne; who, officious, indefatigable in his petty warfare with the abuses of power, is chiefly anxious to stand well with those who sanction them. He interprets the text literally, not to do evil that good may come. He is so fearful of the imputation of the least wrong, that he will never do or let any one else do the greatest right. Summum jus summa injuria, has never entered his head. He is the dog in the political manger: a technical marplot. He takes a systematic delight in giving a lift to his enemies, and in hampering his friends. He is a regular whipper-in on the side of opposition, to all those who go but a hairs-breadth beyond his pragmatical notions of discretion and propriety. He sets up for a balance-master of the constitution and, by insisting on its never deviating from its erect, perpendicular position, is sure to have it overturned. He professes to be greatly scandalized at the abuses and corruptions in our ancient institutions, which are ‘as notorious as the sun at noon-day,’ and would have them removed—but he is much more scandalized at those indiscreet persons who bring to light any of these notorious abuses, in order to have them remedied. He is more angry at those with whom he differs in the smallest iota than at those who differ from him toto cælo: and is at mortal enmity with every antiministerial measure that is not so clogged with imbecility and objections as to be impracticable or absolutely unavailing. He is therefore a bad partisan, and does little mischief, only because he is little attended to. Indeed, his voice is against him.
I did not much like Sir Samuel Romilly’s significant, oracular way of laying down the law in the House:—his self-important assumption of second-hand truths, and his impatience of contradiction, as if he gave his time there to humanity for nothing. He was too solemn a speaker: as Garrow was too flippant and fluent. The latter appeared to have nothing to do but to talk nonsense by the yard, for the pleasure of exposing himself or being exposed by others. He might be said to hold in his hand a general retainer for absurdity, and to hold his head up in the pillory of his own folly with a very unabashed and unblushing gaiety of demeanour. Lawyers, as a general rule, are the very worst speakers in the House: if there are a few nominal exceptions, it is because they are not lawyers.
I do not recollect any other speaker of importance but Mr. Canning; and he requires a chapter by himself. Thus then I would try to estimate him.—The orator and the writer do not always belong to the same class of intellectual character; nor is it, I think, in general, fair to judge of the merit of popular harangues by reducing them to the standard of literary compositions. Something,—a great deal,—is to be given to the suddenness of the emergency, the want of preparation, the instantaneous and effectual, but passing appeal to individual characters, feelings, and events. The speaker has less time allowed him to enforce his purpose, and to procure the impression he aims at than the writer; and he is therefore entitled to produce it by less scrupulous, by more obvious and fugitive means. He must strike the iron while it is hot. The blow must be prompt and decisive. He must mould the convictions and purposes of his hearers while they are under the influence of passion and circumstances,—as the glass-blower moulds the vitreous fluid with his breath. If he can take the popular mind by surprise, and stamp on it, while warm, the impression desired, it is not to be demanded whether the same means would have been equally successful on cool reflection or after the most mature deliberation. That is not the question at issue. At a moment’s notice the expert debater is able to start some topic, some view of a subject, which answers the purpose of the moment. He can suggest a dextrous evasion of his adversaries’ objections, he knows when to seize and take advantage of the impulse of popular feeling, he is master of the dazzling fence of argument, ‘the punto, the stoccado, the reverso,’ the shifts, and quirks, and palpable topics of debate; he can wield these at pleasure, and employ them to advantage on the spur of the occasion—this is all that can be required of him; for it is all that is necessary, and all that he undertakes to do. That another could bring forward more weighty reasons, offer more wholesome advice, convey more sound and extensive information in an indefinite period, is nothing to the purpose; for all this wisdom and knowledge would be of no avail in the supposed circumstances; the critical opportunity for action would be lost, before any use could be made of it. The one thing needful in public speaking is not to say what is best, but the best that can be said in a given time, place, and circumstance. The great qualification therefore of a leader in debate (as of a leader in fight) is presence of mind: he who has not this, wants every thing, and he who has it, may be forgiven almost all other deficiencies. The current coin of his discourses may be light and worthless in itself; but if it is always kept bright and ready for immediate use, it will pass unquestioned; and the public voice will affix to his name the praise of a sharp-witted, able, fluent, and eloquent speaker. We ‘no further seek his merits to disclose, or scan his frailties in their brief abode,’—the popular ear and echo of popular applause. What he says may be trite, pert, shallow, contradictory, false, unfounded, and sophistical; but it was what was wanted for the occasion, and it told with those who heard it. Let it stop there, and all is well. The rest is forgotten; nor is it worth remembering.
But Mr. Canning has an ill habit of printing his speeches: and I doubt where the same oratorical privileges can be extended to printed speeches; or to this gentleman’s speeches in general, even though they should not be printed. Whether afterwards committed to the press or not, they have evidently, I think, been first committed, with great care, to paper or to memory. They have all the marks, and are chargeable with all the malice prepense of written compositions. They are not occasional effusions, but set harangues. They are elaborate impromptus; deeply concerted and highly polished pieces of extempore ingenuity. The repartee has been conceived many months before the luckless observation which gives ostensible birth to it; and an argument woven into a debate is sure to be the counterpart or fag-end of some worn-out sophism of several years’ standing. Mr. Canning is not so properly an orator as an author reciting his own compositions. He foresees (without much of the spirit of prophecy) what will, may, or can be said on some well-conned subject, and gets up, by anticipation, a tissue of excellent good conceits, indifferent bad arguments, classical quotations, and showy similes, which he contrives, by a sort of rhetorical join-hand, to tack on to some straggling observation dropped by some Honourable Member,—and so goes on, with folded arms and sonorous voice, neither quickened nor retarded, neither elevated nor depressed by the hear him’s that now rise on the one side, or are now echoed from the other;—never diverted into laughing gaiety, never hurried into incontrolable passion—till he is regularly delivered in the course of the same number of hours of the labour of weeks and months. To those who are in the secret of the arts of debating, who are versed in the complicated tactics of parliamentary common-place, there is nothing very mysterious in the process, though it startles the uninitiated. The fluency, the monotony, the unimpressible, imposing style of his elocution,—‘swinging slow with sullen roar,’ like the alternate oscillation of a pendulum—afraid of being thrown off his balance—never trusting himself with the smallest inflection of tone or manner from the impulse of the moment,—all shew that the speaker relies on the tenaciousness of his memory, not on the quickness and fertility of his invention. Mr. Canning, I apprehend, never answered a speech: he answers, or affects to answer some observation in a speech, and then manufactures a long tirade out of his own ‘mother-wit and arts well-known before.’ He caps an oration, as school-boys cap verses; and gets up his oracular responses, as Sidrophel and Whackum did theirs, by having met with his customers of old. From that time he has the debate entirely in his own hands, and exercises over it ‘sole sovereign sway and masterdom.’ One of these spontaneous mechanical sallies of his resembles a voluntary played on a barrel-organ: it is a kind of Pan-harmonic display of wit and wisdom—such as Mr. Canning possesses! The amplest stores of his mind are unfolded to their inmost source—the classic lore, the historic page, the philosophic doubt, the sage reply, the sprightly allusion, the delicate irony, the happy turning of a period or insinuation of a paragraph with senatorial dignity and Ovidian grace—are all here concocted, studied, revised, varnished over, till the sense aches at their glossy beauty and sickens at hopeless perfection. Our modern orator’s thoughts have been declared by some to have all the elegance of the antique; I should say, they have only the fragility and smoothness of plaster-cast copies!
If I were compelled to characterize Mr. Canning’s style by a single trait, I should say that he is a mere parodist in verse or prose, in reasoning or in wit. He transposes arguments as he does images, and makes sophistry of the one, and burlesque of the other. ‘What’s serious, he turns to farce.’ This is perhaps, not art in him, so much as nature. The specific levity of his mind causes it to subsist best in the rarified atmosphere of indifference and scorn: it attaches most interest and importance to the slight and worthless. There is a striking want of solidity and keeping in this person’s character. The frivolous, the equivocal, is his delight—the element in which he speaks, and writes, and has his being, as an orator and poet. By applying to low and contemptible objects the language or ideas which have been appropriated to high and swelling contemplations, he reduces the latter to the same paltry level, or renders the former doubly ridiculous. On the same principle, or from not feeling the due force and weight of different things, as they affect either the imagination or the understanding, he brings the slenderest and most evanescent analogies to bear out the most important conclusions; establishes some fact in history by giving it the form of an idle interrogation, like a school-boy declaiming on he knows not what; and thinks to overturn the fixed sentiment of a whole people by an interjection of surprise at what he knows to be unavoidable and unanswerable. There is none of the gravity of the statesman, of the enthusiasm of the patriot, the impatient zeal of the partizan, in Mr. Canning. We distinguish through the disguise of pompous declamation, or the affectation of personal consequence, only the elegant trifler, the thoughtless epigrammatist, spreading ‘a windy fan of painted plumes,’ to catch the breath of popular applause, or to flutter in the tainted breeze of court-favour. ‘As those same plumes, so seems he vain and light,’—never applying his hand to useful action, or his mind to sober truth. A thing’s being evident, is to him a reason for attempting to falsify it: its being right is a reason for straining every nerve to evade or defeat it at all events. It might appear, that with him inversion is the order of nature. ‘Trifles light as air, are’ to his understanding, ‘confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ:’ and he winks and shuts his apprehension up to the most solemn and momentous truths as gross and vulgar errors. His political creed is of an entirely fanciful and fictitious texture—a kind of moral, religious, political, and sentimental filligre-work: or it is made up of monstrous pretexts, and idle shadows, and spurious theories, and mock-alarms. Hence his gravest reasonings have very much an air of concealed irony; and it might sometimes almost be suspected that, by his partial, loose, and unguarded sophisms, he meant to abandon the very cause he professes to magnify and extol.[[59]] It is indeed, his boast, his pride, his pleasure, ‘to make the worse appear the better reason,’ which he does with the pertness of a school-boy and the effrontery of a prostitute: he assumes indecent postures in the debate, confounds the sense of right and wrong by his licentious disregard of both, puts honesty out of countenance by the familiarity of his proposals, makes a jest of principle,—‘takes the rose from the fair forehead of a virtuous cause, and plants a blister there.’
The House of Lords does not at present display much of the aristocracy of talent. The scene is by no means so amusing or dramatic here as in the House of Commons. Every speaker seems to claim his privilege of peerage in the awful attention of his auditors, which is granted while there is any reasonable hope of a return: but it is not easy to hear Lord Grenville repeat the same thing regularly four times over, in different words—to listen to the Marquis of Wellesley who never lowers his voice for four hours from the time he begins, nor utters the commonest syllable in a tone below that in which Pierre curses the Senate—Lord Holland might have other pretensions to alacrity of mind than an impediment of speech, and Lord Liverpool might introduce less of the vis inertiæ of office into his official harangues, than he does. Lord Ellenborough was great ‘in the extremity of an oath.’ Lord Eldon, ‘his face ’twixt tears and smiles contending,’ never loses his place or his temper. It is a pity to see Lord Erskine sit silent, who was once a popular and powerful speaker; and when he does get up to speak, you wish he had said nothing. This nobleman, the other day, on his return to Scotland after an absence of fifty years, made a striking speech on the instinctive and indissoluble attachment of all persons to the country where they are born,—which he considered as an innate and unerring principle of the human mind; and, in expatiating on the advantages of patriotism, argued by way of illustration, that if it were not for this original dispensation of Providence, attaching, and, as it were, rooting every one to the spot where he was bred and born,—civil society should never have existed, nor mankind have been reclaimed from the barbarous and wandering way of life, to which they were in the first instance addicted! How these persons should become attached by habit to places where it appears, from their vagabond dispositions, they never stayed at all, is an oversight of the speaker which remains unexplained. On the same occasion, the learned Lord, in order to produce an effect, observed that when, advancing farther north, he should come to the old playground near his father’s mansion, where he used to play at ball when a child, his sensations would be of a most affecting description. This is possible; but his Lordship returned homewards the next day, thinking, no doubt, he had anticipated all the sentiment of the situation. This puts one in mind of the story one has heard of Tom Sheridan, who told his father he had been down to the bottom of a coal-pit. ‘Then, you are a fool, Tom,’ said the father. ‘Why so, Sir?’ ‘Because,’ said the other, ‘it would have answered all the same purpose to have said you had been down!’
HAYDON’S ‘CHRIST’S AGONY IN THE GARDEN’
| The London Magazine.] | [May, 1821. |