Chapter 19

This rapid obscuration of a reputation which was genuine, for Lowe's powers had been amply proved, was due to no accident, and was apparent long before mental decay set in. The causes lay in himself. One cause was purely physical. He was excessively short-sighted, so much so that when he was writing a letter, his nose was apt to rub out the words his pen had traced; and this defect shut him out from all that knowledge of individual men and of audiences which is to be obtained by watching their faces. Mr. Gladstone, who never seemed to resent Lowe's attacks, and greatly admired his gifts--it was not so clear that Lowe reciprocated the admiration--used to relate that on one occasion when a foreign potentate met the Minister in St. James's Park and put out his hand in friendly greeting, Lowe repelled his advances, and when the King said, "But, Mr. Lowe, you know me quite well," he answered, "Yes, indeed, I know you far too well, and I don't want to have anything more to do with you." He had mistaken the monarch for a prominent politician with whom he had had a sharp encounter on a deputation a few days before! For social purposes Lowe might almost as well have been blind; yet he did not receive that kind of indulgence which is extended to the blind. In the interesting fragment of autobiography which he left, he attributes his unpopularity entirely to this cause, declaring that he was really of a kindly nature, liking his fellow-men just as well as most of them like one another.[42] But in truth his own character had something to answer for. Without being ill-natured, he was deemed a hard-natured man, who did not appear to consider the feelings of others. He had indeed a love of mischief, and gleefully tells in his autobiography how, when travelling in his youth through the Scottish Highlands, he drove the too self-conscious Wordsworth wild by his incessant praise of Walter Scott.[43] He had not in political life more than his fair share of personal enmities. One of them was Disraeli's. They were not unequally matched. Lowe was intellectually in some respects stronger, but he wanted Disraeli's skill in managing men and assemblies. Disraeli resented Lowe's sarcasms, and on one occasion, when the latter had made an indiscreet speech, went out of his way to inflict on him a personal humiliation.

Nor was this Lowe's only defect. Powerful in attack, he was feeble in defence. Terrible as a critic, he had, as his official career showed, little constructive talent, little tact in shaping or recommending his measures. Unsteady or inconstant in purpose, he was at one moment headstrong, at another timid or vacillating. These faults, scarcely noticed when he was in Opposition, sensibly reduced his value as a minister and as a Cabinet colleague.

In private Lowe was good company, bright, alert, and not unkindly. He certainly did not, as was alleged of another famous contemporary, Lord Westbury, positively enjoy the giving of pain. But he had a most unchristian scorn for the slow and the dull and the unenlightened, and never restrained his scorching wit merely for the sake of sparing those who came in his way. If the distinction be permissible, he was not cruel but he was merciless, that is to say, unrestrained by compassion. Instances are not wanting of men who have maintained great influence in spite of their rough tongues and the enmities which rough tongues provoke. But such men have usually also possessed some of the arts of popularity, and have been able to retain the adherence of their party at large, even when they had alienated many who came into personal contact with them. This was not Lowe's case. He did not conceal his contempt for the multitude, and had not the tact needed for humouring it, any more than for managing the House of Commons. The very force and keenness of his intellect kept him aloof from other people and prevented him from understanding their sentiments. He saw things so clearly that he could not tolerate mental confusion, and was apt to reach conclusions so fast that he missed perceiving some of the things which are gradually borne in upon slower minds. There are also instances of strong men who, though they do not revile their opponents, incur hatred because their strength and activity make them feared. Hostility concentrates itself on the opponents deemed most formidable, and a political leader who is spared while his fellows are attacked cannot safely assume that this immunity is a tribute to his virtues. Incessant abuse fell to the lot of Mr. Bright, who was not often, and of Mr. Gladstone, who was hardly ever, personally bitter in invective. But in compensation Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone received enthusiastic loyalty from their followers. For Lowe there was no such compensation. Even his own side did not love him. There was also a certain harshness, perhaps a certain narrowness, about his views. Even in those days of rigid economics, he took an exceptionally rigid view of all economic problems, refusing to make allowance for any motives except those of bare self-interest. Though he did not belong by education or by social ties to the Utilitarian group, and gave an ungracious reception to J. S. Mill's first speeches in the House of Commons, he was a far more stringent and consistent exponent of the harder kind of Benthamism than was Mill himself. He professed, and doubtless to some extent felt, a contempt for appeals to historical or literary sentiment, and relished nothing more than deriding his own classical training as belonging to an effete and absurd scheme of education. He left his mark on our elementary school system by establishing the system of payment by results, but nearly every change made in that system since his day has tended to destroy the alterations he made and to bring back the older condition of things, though no doubt in an amended form. His ideas of University reform were crude and barren, limited, indeed, to the substitution of what the Germans call "bread studies" for mental cultivation, and to the extension of the plan of competitive examinations for honours and money prizes, a plan which more and more displeases the most enlightened University teachers, and is felt to have done more harm than good to Oxford and Cambridge, where it has had the fullest play. He had also, and could give good reasons for his opinion, a hearty dislike to endowments of all kinds; and once, when asked by a Royal Commission to suggest a mode of improving their application, answered in his trenchant way, "Get rid of them. Throw them into the sea."

It would not be fair to blame Lowe for the results which followed his vigorous action against the extension of the suffrage in 1866, for no one could then have predicted that in the following year the Tories, beguiled by Mr. Disraeli, would reverse their former attitude and carry a suffrage bill far wider than that which they had rejected a year before. But the sequel of the successful resistance of 1866 may stand as a warning to those who think that the course of thoroughgoing opposition to a measure they dislike is, because it seems courageous, likely to be the right and wise course for patriotic men. Had the moderate bill of 1866 been suffered to pass, the question of further extending the suffrage might possibly have slept for another thirty years, for there was no very general or urgent cry for it among the working people, and England would have continued to be ruled in the main by voters belonging to the middle class and the upper section of the working class. The consequence of the heated contest of 1866 was not only to bring about a larger immediate change in 1867, but to create an interest in the question which soon prompted the demand for the extension of household suffrage to the counties, and completed in 1884-85 the process by which England has become virtually a democracy, though a plutocratic democracy, still affected by the habits and notions of oligarchic days. Thus Robert Lowe, as much as Disraeli and Gladstone, may in a sense be called an author of the tremendous change which has passed upon the British Constitution since 1866, and the extent of which was not for a long while realised. Lowe himself never recanted his views, but never repeated his declaration of them, feeling that he had incurred unpopularity enough, and probably feeling also that the case was hopeless.

People who disliked his lugubrious forecasts used to call him a Cassandra, perhaps forgetting that, besides the distinctive feature of Cassandra's prophecies that nobody believed them, there was another distinctive feature, viz. that they came true. Did Lowe's? It is often profitable and sometimes amusing to turn back to the predictions through which eminent men relieved their perturbed souls, and see how far these superior minds were able to discern the tendencies, already at work in their time, which were beginning to gain strength, and were destined to determine the future. Whoever reads Lowe's speeches of 1865-67 may do worse than glance at the same time at a book,[44] long since forgotten, which contains the efforts of a group of young University Liberals to refute the arguments used by him and by Lord Cairns, the strongest of his allies, in their opposition to schemes of parliamentary reform.

To compare the optimism of these young writers and Lowe's pessimism with what has actually come to pass is a not uninstructive task. True it is that England has had only thirty-five years' experience of the Reform Act of 1867, and only seventeen years' experience of that even greater step towards pure democracy which was effected by the Franchise and Redistribution Acts of 1884-85. We are still far from knowing what sorts of Parliaments and policies the enlarged suffrage will end by giving. But some at least of the mischiefs Lowe foretold have not arrived. He expected first of all a rapid increase in corruption and intimidation at parliamentary elections. The quality of the House of Commons would decline, because money would rule, and small boroughs would no longer open the path by which talent could enter. Members would be either millionaires or demagogues, and they would also become far more subservient to their constituents. Universal suffrage would soon arrive, because no halting-place between the £10 franchise[45] and universal suffrage could be found. Placed on a democratic basis, the House of Commons would not be able to retain its authority over the Executive. The House of Lords, the Established Church, the judicial bench (in that dignity and that independence which are essential to its usefulness), would be overthrown as England passed into "the bare and level plain of democracy where every ant-hill is a mountain and every thistle a forest tree." These and the other features characteristic of popular government on which Lowe savagely descanted were pieced together out of Plato and Tocqueville, coupled with his own disagreeable experiences of Australian politics. None of the predicted evils can be said to have as yet become features of the polity and government of England,[46] though the power of the House relatively to the Cabinet does seem to be declining. Yet some of Lowe's incidental remarks are true, and not least true is his prediction that democracies will be found just as prone to war, just as apt to be swept away by passion, as other kinds of government have been. Few signs herald the approach of that millennium of peace and enlightenment which Cobden foretold and for which Gladstone did not cease to hope.

No one since Lowe has taken up the part of _advocatus diaboli_ against democracy which he played in 1866.[47] Since Disraeli passed the Household Suffrage in Boroughs Bill in 1867, a nullification of Lowe's triumph which incensed him more than ever against Disraeli, no one has ever come forward in England as the avowed enemy of changes designed to popularise our government. Parties have quarrelled over the time and the manner of extensions of the franchise, but the issue of principle raised in 1866 has not been raised again. Even in 1884, when Mr. Gladstone carried his bill for assimilating the county franchise to that existing in boroughs, the Tory party did not oppose the measure in principle, but confined themselves to insisting that it should be accompanied by a scheme for the redistribution of seats. The secret, first unveiled by Disraeli, that the masses will as readily vote for the Tory party as for the Liberal, is now common property, and universal suffrage, when it comes to be offered, is as likely to be offered by the former party as by the latter. This gives a touch of historical interest to Lowe's speeches of 1866. They are the swan-song of the old constitutionalism. The changes which came in 1867 and 1884 must have come sooner or later, for they were in the natural line of development as we see it all over the world; but they might have come much later had not Lowe's opposition wrecked the moderate scheme of 1866. Apart from that episode Lowe's career would now be scarcely remembered, or would be remembered by those who knew his splendid gifts as an illustration of the maxim that mere intellectual power does not stand first among the elements of character that go to the winning of a foremost place.

[41] A carefully written life of Lord Sherbrooke (in two volumes) by Mr. Patchett Martin was published in 1896. The most interesting part of it is the short fragment of autobiography with which it begins, and which carries the story down to Lowe's arrival in Australia.

[42] In his autobiography he writes, "With a quiet temper and a real wish to please, I have been obliged all my life to submit to an amount of unpopularity which I really did not deserve, and to feel myself condemned for what were really physical rather than moral deficiencies."

[43] There was an anecdote current in the University of Oxford down to my time that when Lowe was examining in the examination which the statutes call "Responsions," the dons "Little-go," and the undergraduates "Smalls," a friend coming in while the _viva voce_ was in progress, asked him how he was getting on. "Excellently," said Lowe; "five men plucked already, and the sixth very shaky." Another tale, not likely to have been invented, relates that when he and several members of the then Liberal Ministry were staying in Dublin with the Lord Lieutenant, and had taken an excursion into the Wicklow hills, they found themselves one afternoon obliged to wait for half an hour at a railway station. To pass the time, Lowe forthwith engaged in a dispute about the charge with the car-drivers who had brought them, a dispute which soon became hot and noisy, to the delight of Lowe, but to the horror of the old Lord Chancellor, who was one of the party.

[44] _Essays on Reform_, published in 1867.

[45] The then borough qualification, which Mr. Gladstone's Bill proposed to reduce to £7.

[46] Mr. Gladstone said to me in 1897 that the extension of the suffrage had, in his judgment, improved the quality of legislation, making it more regardful of the interests of the body of the people, but had not improved the quality of the House of Commons.

[47] Sir H. S. Maine's _Quarterly Review_ articles, published in a volume under the title of _Popular Government_, come nearest to being a literary presentation of the case against democracy, but they are, with all their ingenuity and grace of style, so provokingly vague and loosely expressed that there can seldom be found in them a proposition with which one can agree, or from which one can differ. E. de Laveleye's well-known book is not much more substantial, but instruction may (as respects France) be found in the late Edmond Schérer's _De la Démocratie_, and (as respects England and the United States) in M. Ostrogorski's recent book, _Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties_.

WILLIAM ROBERTSON SMITH

Robertson Smith,[48] the most widely learned and one of the most powerful teachers that either Cambridge or Oxford could show during the years of his residence in England, died at the age of forty-seven on the 31st of March 1894. To the English public generally his name was little known, or was remembered only in connection with the theological controversy and ecclesiastical trial of which he had been the central figure in Scotland fifteen years before. But on the Continent of Europe and by Orientalists generally he was regarded as the foremost Semitic scholar of Britain, and by those who knew him as one of the most remarkable men of his time.

He was born in 1846 in the quiet pastoral valley of the Don, in Aberdeenshire. His father, who was a minister of the Scottish Free Church in the parish of Keig, possessed high mathematical talent, and his mother, who survived him six years, was a woman of great force of character, who retained till her death, at seventy-six years of age, the full exercise of her keen intelligence. Smith went straight from his father's teaching to the University of Aberdeen, and after graduating there, continued his studies first at Bonn in 1865, and afterwards at Göttingen (1869). When only twenty-four he became Professor of Oriental Languages in the College or Divinity School of the Free Church at Aberdeen, and two years later was chosen one of the revisers of the Old Testament, a striking honour for so young a man. In 1881 he became first assistant-editor and then editor-in-chief of the ninth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. He was exceptionally qualified for the post by the variety of his attainments and by the extreme quickness of his mind, which rapidly acquired knowledge on almost any kind of subject. Those who knew him are agreed that among all the eminent men who have been connected with this great _Encyclopædia_ from its first beginning nearly a century and a half ago until now, he was surpassed by none, if equalled by any, in the range of his learning and in the capacity to bring learning to bear upon editorial work. He took infinite pains to find the most competent writers, and was able to exercise effective personal supervision over a very large proportion of the articles. The ninth edition was much fuller and more thorough than any of its predecessors; and good as the first twelve volumes were, a still higher level of excellence was attained in the latter half, a result due to his industry and discernment. Not a few of the articles on subjects connected with the Old Testament were from his own pen; and they were among the best in the work.

The appearance of one of them, that entitled "Bible," which contained a general view of the history of the canonical books of Scripture, their dates, authorship, and reception by the Christian Church, became a turning-point in his life. The propositions he stated regarding the origin of parts of the Old Testament, particularly the Pentateuch, excited alarm and displeasure in Scotland, where few persons had become aware of the conclusions reached by recent Biblical scholars in Continental Europe. The article was able, clear, and fearless, plainly the work of a master hand. The views it advanced were not for the most part due to Smith's own investigations, but were to be found in the writings of other learned men. Neither would they now be thought extreme; they are in fact accepted to-day by many writers of unquestioned orthodoxy in Britain and a (perhaps smaller) number in the United States. In 1876, however, these views were new and startling to those who had not studied in Germany or followed the researches of such men as Ewald, Kuenen, and Wellhausen. The Scottish Free Church had theretofore prided itself upon the rigidity of its orthodoxy; and while among the younger ministers there were a good many able and learned scholars holding what used to be called "advanced views," the mass of the elder and middle-aged clergy had gone on in the old-fashioned traditions of verbal inspiration, and took every word in the Five Books (except the last chapter of Deuteronomy) to have been written down by Moses. It was only natural that their anger should be kindled against the young professor, whose theories seemed to cut away the ground from under their feet. Proceedings were (1876) taken against him before the Presbytery of Aberdeen, and the case found its way thence to the Synod of Aberdeen, and ultimately to the General Assembly of the Free Church. In one form or another (for the flame was lit anew by other articles published by him in the _Encyclopædia_) it lingered on for five years. So far from yielding to the storm, Robertson Smith defied it, maintaining not only the truth of his views, but their compatibility with the Presbyterian standards as contained in the Confession of Faith and the Longer and Shorter Catechisms. In this latter contention he was successful, proving that the divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had not committed themselves to any specific doctrine of inspiration, still less to any dogmatic deliverance as to the authorship of particular books of Scripture. The standards simply declared that the Word of God was contained in the canonical books, and as there had been little or no controversy between Protestants and Roman Catholics regarding the date or the authorship or the divine authority of those books (apart of course from disputes regarding the Apocrypha), had not dealt specifically with those last mentioned matters. As it was by reference to the Confession of Faith that the offence alleged had to be established, Smith made good his defence; so in the end, finding it impossible to convict him of deviation from the standards, and thereby to deal with him as an ordained minister of the Church, his adversaries fell back on the plan of depriving him, by an executive rather than judicial vote, not indeed of his clerical status, but of his professorship, on the ground of the alleged "unsettling character" of his teaching.