Lives of Men of Letters and of Science. By HENRY LORD BROUGHAM, F.R.S., &c. 2 vols. London, 1845-6. It is a questionable point whether a man, distinguished himself, is the best biographer of distinguished men. In such a biographer there will ever be a marked tendency to judge others by his own standard. He will not forget that the rules which he lays down for estimating the actions and character of those whose history he writes may be used by cotemporaries and by posterity for judging his own actions and himself. Something of that egotism, so essential perhaps for success and distinction in the political or literary career, will infallibly creep in to warp his judgment of others, or at least to make him chary of advancing any proposition by which his own fame may be estimated or impaired. Lord Brougham, writing of Voltaire, can scarcely be an unprejudiced biographer. With a genius as versatile, perhaps, as his hero, and an ambition for universal reputation certainly as confirmed, can it be astonishing that his egotism should be aroused, his admiration often unreasonable, and his condemnations almost always reluctant? At the same time it is impossible to deny that Lord Brougham possesses many advantages over less experienced biographers. His knowledge of men and things is extensive; he is endowed with a genius which, if not profound, enables him to embrace at one grasp subjects, a knowledge of which others might require years to obtain. If not a master of universal science, he at least knows enough of many subjects to comprehend and appreciate the great masters in each. He has not the qualities of a Plutarch or of a Boswell, but he has others which, if they do not shine greatest in biography, render a biography by him often interesting and always instructive. The greatest quality of a biographer is that simplicity and sensibility of mind which render the most trivial characteristics of his subjects a matter of attention and consideration, which make him note every look and adventure of his hero as an incident worthy of record. Correctness of judgment is not so much required in him as minuteness of delineation. His province is to observe and to narrate, the historian or the moralist comes afterwards to weigh and to determine. Any work bearing the title of biography, but falling short of this description, does not come up to the standard of true biography: not, indeed, that every trifle is to be noted by a biographer, but nothing should be omitted which can in any way present the mind and habits of his VOL. III. N subject vividly to the reader. For such a task none of the higher qualities of genius are required, and the best biographies have therefore been written by men possessed of little pretensions to great capacity. On the other hand, biographies by men of great genius have almost invariably been treatises and not biographies; or, at least, if it has been otherwise occasionally, it has been in the case of biographers with whose genius a marked predisposition towards meditativeness was joined. Men of action have seldom been good biographers. Lord Brougham must be placed in this class, and of all men of action Lord Brougham, with the intense restlessness of his mind and the rapidity of his conclusions, is perhaps the least fitted to be the author of a biography. It is not astonishing, then, that this work, though entitled, The Lives of Men of Letters and of Science, should approach much nearer to the character of a discourse on the lives and writings of men of letters and of science, than to that of biography. Taking this work, then, in its proper character as a series of discourses-within which classification its peculiarly diffuse and rhetorical style bring it still more-it must be allowed considerable merits. The style is clear, nervous, and easy, though occasionally diffuse and tautological; and the matter is full of interesting observations which, whilst they do not pretend to exhaust the subject or even to embrace it all, never fail to rivet the attention as the off-hand strictures of a man of very great intellect, of extensive acquirements, and of a bold and versatile ambition. The work is not, however, without very serious blemishes. The faults of French are positively disgraceful in so well got up a publication, and to a foreigner unwilling to make allowances for the negligences of a printer's devil, they would bear conclusions very disparaging to our knowledge of continental literature. Could such a line as this have escaped the acuteness of even the dullest of printer's readers? 'Mon bras chargé de fers ne les put pas secourir.' And again, Aime la verité mais pardonnez à l'erreur.' But these blemishes, which are not unfrequent, are not the worst of their kind. There are others really more serious, and of the responsibility for which we cannot acquit the noble author. We allude to the translation of French verses into Lord Brougham's own rhymes. Great orators are not always great poets, but Cicero's 'O! fortunatam natam me consule Romam,' is certainly outheroded by the modern orator's attempts at versification. That Lord Brougham, whose idlest relaxations are geometrical problems and whose career has been spent among the subtleties of the Nisi Prius and Westminster courts, should not translate like Dryden or versify like Pope, is a matter which, without in any way disparaging his almost universal attainments, his greatest friends even would be willing to concede. But when we see him obtruding into a serious and otherwise respectable work poetical translations of the most doggrel description, it is impossible not to suspect that the vanity which he blames Gibbon so much for indulging in, when the latter wrote a work in French, has led himself into the folly of entering upon a province which is not his own. But the peculiar kind of modesty with which Lord Brougham introduces these translations is perhaps the most amusing circumstance. Take the following lines of Voltaire, for example, and the remarks and translation with which Lord Brougham accompanies them. Qu'il est grand, qu'il est doux de se dire a soi-même The following translation,' says Lord Brougham, is most imperfect, and has only the merit of being literal.” 'How grand, how sweet, the heavenly strains ascend, When a writer can find no more literal translation for Se dire a soi-même,' than the wretched bathos, The heavenly strains ascend,' his best course would be not to disfigure his otherwise elegant production by translations in what he considers poetry. Lord Brougham also advances certain doctrines which may admit of some question. Speaking of Voltaire's religious opinions, he says: It is evident that strictly speaking blasphemy can only be committed by a person who believes in the existence and in the attributes of the Deity whom he impugns either by ridicule or by reasoning. An Atheist is wholly incapable of the crime. When he heaps epithets of abuse on the Creator or turns his attributes into ridicule, he is assailing or scoffing at an empty name-at a being whom he believes to have no existence.' Where will this lead? This is carrying out the principle of private judgment with a vengeance. On the same grounds any opinions can be justified; the thief and the murderer may claim the privilege of asserting their particular views, may proclaim and justify them, and how can they be condemned for opinions which to them seem just? Some limit must be placed to the extension of this system, which would allow all men to form theories of their own, and of practising actions with which, if these theories are just, nobody can cavil. On the same principles the Indian Thug despises robbery and boasts himself a murderer, and the frenzied Malay runs a muck immolating whomsoever chance throws in his way on the same principles. At best, it is a principle which, if true, should not be introduced into a work intended for popular perusal; it should be kept in the shade, and allowed to excuse those whose really conscientious ignorance may give them a claim to its protection, but not held up openly and avowedly to defend men not ignorant but enlightened, not deprived of the means of forming a correct estimation of things, but possessed of all the means which civilization, Christianity, and a high state of personal cultivation could contribute towards enabling them to judge rightly and think correctly. It is impossible not to admire the indignation with which Lord Brougham treats Dr. Johnson for refusing to associate with Hume on account of the religious opinions of the latter. Without expressing any approbation of Dr. Johnson's conduct in this respect, we cannot but wonder that Lord Brougham should not have extended to Dr. Johnson's conscientious prejudices something of that liberal tenderness with which he treats the prejudices of another kind which Voltaire and the Free-thinking philosophers were wont to entertain towards all who differed with them. If Voltaire was justified in his Deism, assuredly Dr. Johnson, on the same ground of conscientious conviction, cannot be utterly condemned for entertaining a dislike to the society of Deists. This dislike, we are aware, he was not accustomed to express in the most courteous manner, but this was the fault of his manner, not of his conduct. His conduct must be judged in another way, and if one man is justified in denying the most sacred convictions of another, we do not see how that other can be called a bigot for disliking his society. But Lord Brougham, it seems to us, is not always alive to the finer susceptibilities of delicacy and morality. On the ordinary topics generally dilated upon at the present day he speaks with abundance; true to his calling of an orator and an advocate, he is generally on the side of his readers; but when any subject arises of doubt, or on which there is not in the breasts of those for whom he writes any certain rule to guide him, he is often greatly deficient. He does not teach his reader, he merely accompanies him. In some cases, it is true, as in that of indifferentism about opinions, he goes perhaps a little further than his readers will be willing to follow him. Still he is with the times. He is on the track, and if he proceeds too far it is in no unusual direction. But where there is not some strong popular sentiment to keep him to the right direction, he often stands still, and is sometimes inconsistent and almost always unsatisfactory, There is something, for instance, truly horrifying in the manner with which he treats, in his life of Rousseau, Madame Warrens, notorious for her debaucheries, to all those who have perused the Confessions. His character of this lady is that she appears to have been a woman of some accomplishments, of considerable personal charms, of attractive manners, of a most kind and charitable disposition, and of very loose principles. This was the lady of whom Lord Brougham, avoiding the hideous sentimentalities of Rousseau respecting her, but assuming some of his tenderness, says, that one of her peculiarities was to make herself uniformly the mistress of all her men servants, besides having occasional deviations into a superior rank of life.' This was the lady whose constant and most delicate kindness to Rousseau himself was repaid by much ingratitude;' and of her good qualities Lord Brougham, in spite of her peculiarity,' which, as we have seen, he passes tenderly over, is never tired of speaking. After being treated on his first stay with the most delicate kindness by her, Rousseau, on his return afterwards to Chamberry, where she was residing, was again ' received kindly,' and his patroness now promoted him to the rank of a lover, but without discarding the servant Claude Anet, who also took care of her botanical as well as her amorous concerus.' And thus the little episode formed in the life of Rousseau by the concerns of this kind-hearted but imprudent woman,' as Lord Brougham calls her, affords an opportunity of judging of the noble author's manner of looking upon things, more amusing, undoubtedly, than conducive, we think, to what has been his lordship's aim in life, the diffusion of useful knowledge. But there are passages in this work which it is more agreeable for us to notice than it is to expose its blemishes. As a whole it is worthy of its author, and though inferior to his Statesmen of the reign of George the Third in style and composition, it has some qualities which render it more interesting. The Statesmen' possessed the charm of the personal knowledge of the writer, who was treating in many instances of men whom he had known, and sometimes of transactions in which he himself had taken part. The sketches of Eldon and of the other judges, and of Canning among the orators, if incorrect in their delineations, will for ever live as the performances of a cotemporary, and of one who from his peculiar position and pursuits was eminently able to do justice to his subject. But Lord Brougham's peculiar manner of writing what he terms Lives,' bearing in reality much more of the character of what is generally considered a critique and a review, is a cause why his literary lives are for 6 |