by George Gilfillan.
Originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Harper and Brothers) vol.8 #44 (Jan 1854).
Nothing is more remarkable than the difference between the style of speaking which prevailed in the days of Fox and Sheridan, and that which prevails in the present British House of Commons. Now it is plain, perspicuous common sense, delivered with easy energy, which is the favorite; figures and flights, except from the lips of a few privileged persons, who are becoming yearly fewer in number, are a nuisance and bore. Latin and Greek quotations are never, or seldom, heard. Clever personalities are, indeed, always popular; but, in general, Parliamentary oratory and wit are extinct, and the common mode of discussion there is as dry as the "remainder biscuit after a voyage." O'Connell and Sheil were the last whom the House endured to talk them into enthusiasm, or send through their hearts the great thrills of oratory. Macaulay is the only man still in the Commons whom it permits to philosophize before it, or give it a literary treat. Disraeli is listened to as the cleverest of mountebanks; Cobden, partly from his calm common sense, and principally for his past reputation; Bright for his pop-gun briskness and pluck; Lord Palmerston for his tact and statesmanship; and Lord John Russell for his old prestige and reputed honesty. But we doubt if the present House contains one orator, in the high sense of that word—one who moves, thrills, electrifies, carries the members away in a torrent of burning enthusiasm.
The Parliament of the past was a very different affair. It was composed, not of calculating utilitarians, but of jolly squires, who, by the time the debate began, were generally in a state of semi-civilation. To awaken their attention when they were asleep, or sustain their enthusiasm while they were still awake, something very highly spiced was absolutely necessary. The speakers, too, all reeking from potations pottle-deep, allowed themselves the amplest scope and range. They spoke with prodigious impetuosity and fury. They smote the table with their fists. They bellowed till the roof of St. Stephen's rang again. They gave the reins to imagination, when they had any; or, when they wanted it, they made up the deficiency by profuse quotations from the Latin poets. Figures often detestably bad, and quotations often excessively malapropos, flew from the Opposition to the Ministerial benches, and thence back again, in endless volleys. Wit, too, elaborate when not felicitous, banter, fierce personalities, were standing articles of Parliamentary entertainment. There was far more, in short, of "keen encounter of men's wits;" and attendance on the debates, in these days, was incomparably more stimulating and refreshing than it is at present. Our mouth absolutely waters as we think of a critic who could, in the last century, have stepped in to St. Stephen's, and heard "lean" Pitt uttering his stately sarcasms, or pronouncing Virgil oro rotundo; or Fox wrestling with an argument, like a ship struggling among the breakers—his face inflamed with wine and zeal, his utterance choked, and his whole being shaken with the fury of his excitement; or Dunning, hawking and spitting at every second sentence of his keen and weighty wisdom; or Burke, with loud, unmitigated voice and broken brogue, pouring out his epea pteroenta to half-willing ears; or bluff Henry Dundas, talking to the members in the same rough round Doric which he used in the vacation to his cottars at Dunira, or his feuars in Comrie; or Sheridan, enouncing his false brilliancies of sentiment, and his real brilliancies of wit, with the same lack-lustre and coarse physiognomy inspired into meaning and power by two sparkling, splendid eyes, and in the same high, but husky tones, dying away occasionally into inglorious hiccoughs, or into grunts of stifled, but irrepressible laughter.
Poor Brinsley Sheridan! These should have been the only words inscribed on his tombstone. He was one of those moral wrecks over whom your grief can not be profound, since there is nothing profound in their natures, but whom you can not but pity far more than you blame, and in certain moods laugh at even more than you pity. You are reminded of an Irish funeral, where mirth and sorrow dance an awkward dance together, and where you are tempted to weep and smile at the same time. Sheridan's whole existence was a farce, ending at last in a brief but frightful tragedy. It was one long scramble. He was a mountebank of amazing talent, who, skipping long upon tight-ropes, at last lost his balance, and perished through his very agility. Except Canning, he was the last eminently successful adventurer who exhibited on the Parliamentary stage. We have had P. Borthwick since, but he was on a smaller scale, and was not successful. We have had Brougham and Disraeli, too, but their destiny is not yet fully accomplished, and we must speak of one of them, at least, chiefly in the future tense.
Sheridan came forth originally under the most unfavorable auspices. He was the son of a ranting, strolling manager—half elocutionist, half player—the most unfortunate of hybrids, whose memory now lives entirely through Boswell, and through the gifted race who have sprung from him. Young Sheridan had no patrimony—not a shilling, indeed, all his life that he could call his own. He had a very imperfect education; although this, indeed, was partly his own fault, for his master was Parr. But he was forced, at the age of eighteen, through his father's embarrassments, to quit school forever; and then, with nothing but his wits, and without money, credit, learning, character, paternal prestige, or moral training, he was flung a very orphan upon the world, to battle with or to trick it as he best could. He had not the heroism or perseverance to try the first; he determined on the latter; and, like Napoleon in his campaign of 1814— who gained victories without an army, and made maneuvers supply the lack of men—Sheridan for forty-six years lived upon stratagem, cajolery, cleverness, and impudence. His life resembled French cookery, by the skill of which a nettle or two, a bone or two, sometimes supply materials for splendid dinners, and are made to feed large and hungry companies. So Sheridan, without a sixpence, contrived to spend thousands; without much original wit, passed for the first comic writer of his century; without any political science, managed to embroil all the parties in the country; without an atom of imagination, got the credit of being a genius; with no conversational power, became celebrated as a talker; and with only the faculty of simulating sympathy, was rated as an orator, above Fox, Pitt, and Burke.
Most dexterous of charlatans, most magnificent of mimics, certainly Sheridan wert thou! In all-sided similation, thou didst stand unrivaled and alone! Thou wouldst have volunteered to do (and couldst have in a measure done) any thing; construe a Greek play, without a word of Greek; give a Latin oration, or quote Lucretius, without having ever advanced further than the rudiments; preach a sermon on any subject at an hour's notice; solve any problem in "Euclid," or in "Newton's Fluxions," without having ever crossed the Pons Asinorum; plead a complicated cause, as that of Hastings, "without a bag" (trusting to thy power of "abusing Ned Law, ridiculing Plumer's long orations, making the court laugh, and pleasing the women!"); and support both sides of any question according to whim, and without understanding either: such, or similar feats were easy to thee, unballasted as thou wert by an atom of conscience, and filled as thy sails were by the breath of boundless assurance and the unmeasured spirit of wine! What a pity that this world had been any thing else than a jest and a gala-day, then thou hadst completely filled thy sphere, and gained laurels inferior only to those of Momus, or of Bacchus, as he returned from the conquest of India! But alas! it is a "serious thing to live, as well as to die," and men will sometimes say of laughter, "it is mad," and of mirth, "what doth it profit?"
We look upon Sheridan's career and works as, on the whole, the most useless in the history of literature. He said many clever things, made many flashy speeches, has left two or three clever plays, but he has done little or nothing: told no new truth, enforced no old one—failed in blasting even "scandal," the only task he set himself in morals to do—and neither helped, nor hindered, by a single inch, the advancement of society. "Man," says Jeremy Taylor, "is a bubble." Surely he must have foreseen the advent of Sheridan, for a bubble of the first magnitude was he; and, after dancing his giddy hour, he went down at last into the portion of weeds and outworn faces, and bids fair in another century to be nearly forgotten.
Nothing so stamps a charlatan as perpetually pretending to do great things without labor, and-yet all the while laboring hard in secret, We have known even ministers of the gospel, whose most elaborate efforts, if you believed themselves, were quite extempore. This despicable kind of pretense was one of Sheridan's besetting sins. Previous to the famous occasion to which we have referred, when he appeared in Westminster Hall "without a bag," and made a splendid speech without any materials, we are told that he passed two or three days alone at Wanstead, so occupied from morning till night in reading and writing of papers, as to complain in the evenings that he had "motes before his eyes." Our readers will remember, too, how carefully he prepared his bon-mots—polished them in private, put the "smooth-stones" deliberately in his scrip, waited the opportunity of discharging them to most advantage—nay, created the opportunity when it was slow to come. How clever, yet contemptible, was his practice of curving in the wave of the conversation, till it came to a point where he could launch his smart little wherry amid a roar of applause. He had no rich flow of talk like Burke, nor was he ever ready alike with wit and argument, like Johnson—he seldom said above one or two good things in an evening, and these were almost always the fruit of hard previous labor. He produced his witticisms with as much effort as his friend Rogers his couplets; of whom Sydney Smith used to say, that "when Rogers wished to be delivered of a couplet, he took to bed, spread saw-dust on the road, and told the servants to assure all callers that he was as well as could be expected." This, in Sheridan's case, was the more extraordinary, as the witticisms were often not his own, and as all he had to supply was often the expression. He was, we fear, a habitual plagiarist. He would snatch fine things from the very lips of Francis and Burke, and retail them in the Commons and elsewhere as his own. On the whole, his vein of wit was meagre, nor was it of the subtlest or most refined order. He was more of an original in practical jokes, than in any thing else, although these, too, were often coarse, and often cruel. Witness his drawing his friend Tickell into a dark room, which Sheridan had previously filled with crockery, and getting him to stumble, and cut himself in various places—Tickell, indeed, "consoling himself by remembering, while lying in bed covered with patches, that the trick was so well done."
His plays are his sole title to consideration as an author. The "Rivals" is an uproarious farce, rather than a fine play; and, even in its farcical elements, is not so good, we think, as Goldsraith's "Good-natured Man, or "She Stoops to Conquer." It wants Goldsmith's inimitable bonhommie. The "School for Scandal" is wearisomely witty; you cry out for a plain scene, or a plain sentence, as for a pearl of price. The whole of the characters are for ever "talking their best" and doing their worst. The wit, too, is often far-fetched, and the morality is but so and so. There is not a spark of humor or true genius. It is, in short, a display of the utmost length to which mere cleverness can carry an author; and is, perhaps, the best artificial comedy in the language. But when you compare it with even the worst of Shakspeare's plays, what a cold, starched, and heartless affair it seems. The poorest of Shakspeare's comedies is one of nature's flowers—weeds, if you please—but this, the most elaborate of Sheridan's, is a mere gum-flower, without scent or savor. "Pizarro" is far worse; and nothing proves more thoroughly that barrenness of imagination we have ascribed to Sheridan. It never rises above a species of convulsive and twisted bombast, worked up as in an agony of ambitious weakness, which we find frequent also in his speeches. His "Duenna" is exceedingly amusing, and pretends to be nothing more. In the "Critic," Sir Fretful Plagiary is capital; and, next, perhaps, to Joseph Surface, has deeper and subtler strokes than any character Sheridan has drawn. His other pieces of manufacture for the stage, such as the "Stranger," and the most of his smaller poems, are beneath criticism.
Byron, whose unbounded admiration of Pope and Sheridan is one of the most unaccountable points in all his unaccountable character, says, that "whatever Sheridan seriously attempted was best in its way—he wrote the best opera, the best farce, the best comedy, the best monologue, and made the best speech." We venture to doubt these dicta. The "Duenna" is not equal to the "Beggar's Opera" for originality and spirit, although it is much more elaborate. The "Critic" can not be compared in rich fun to the "Comedy of Errors." Making the best monologue is but a small achievement. The "School for Seandal," like "Tom Jones," is an admirable piece of art; but like it, too, the materials are vile—it is a palace made of dung, and, even in wit, it is inferior to some of Congreve's. The speech on the Begum Charge produced an unequaled effect; but this does not prove its surpassing merit; and the extracts preserved of it are in Sheridan's worst style. His second speech on the same subject we have entire; it was thought by many superior to the first, and yet is little better than a tissue of laborious trash. Witness the famous panegyric on filial piety!
This leads us more particularly to speak of Sheridan the orator. Now, here we grant that we have him at a considerable disadvantage. He never took the trouble of correcting and republishing his speeches, partly because he was constitutionally indolent, and partly because, we suspect, he rated them at their proper value. He talked for immediate effect and reputation, and cared nothing for future fame. His speeches realized the test of a good speech, proposed, not without a sly personal reference, by Fox. "The speech that reads well must be a bad speech." Sheridan knew that his speeches had been effective in delivery; he had a tolerable good guess that they would be less so in print, and therefore he prudently abstained from giving them to the world. He had, unquestionably, many of the elements of a first-rate speaker. His voice was somewhat thick, but had considerable compass. His manner was theatrical, but lively and energetic. His language was fluent, profuse, and copiously figured. He delighted in antithesis, apostrophe, and rhetorical exaggeration. His witty turns were not numerous; but, whether prepared or not, were often very happy. He had great confidence, and uniform self-possession. Best of all, was a vein of strong good sense, which he brought more effectually and entirely to bear upon public affairs, as none of it was employed upon the care of his private conduct! He was like those creatures which feed their young, but can not themselves, at the breast. Sheridan, as well as Charles II., seldom did a wise thing, and seldom said a foolish one. On certain occasions this instinct did him and the country good service, and was mistaken for the workings of a higher principle—for the prophetic intuitions of genius. His conduct in reference to the Mutiny at the Nore has been often praised. Except embroiling the Whigs, it was the only thing he ever did. While the ministry were in open panic, and the opposition were secretly exulting, Sheridan stepped forward, partly through a generous impulse and partly from the strength of his insight into consequences, and saved the state. Like Danton, in a similar crisis in France, he alone remained unshaken, while all around were trembling; although some splenetic person might explain the conduct of both upon the principle that great blackguards are often the coolest in a pestilence or a shipwreck. In addition to all these qualities, Sheridan, on great and thrilling crises, such as the trial of Hastings, rose to an excitement and energy which produced on his audience all the immediate effects of the highest oratory.
Such were his merits. His defects were equally obvious. He was, first, sadly deficient in taste. It was, we are certain, of him that Wilkes said to Boswell, "It was observed of Apelles' Venus, that her flesh seemed as if she had been nourished an roses, so his oratory would sometimes make one suspect that he eats potatoes and drinks whisky." Many noble writers and speakers, such as Milton in his prose, Burke, and Chalmers, have been deficient in taste; but the deficiency has only amounted to extravagance or oddity, not to vulgarity and tawdriness. But Sheridan is often tawdry and vulgar, and often affected, which is worse than either, because the parent of both. He was, besides, destitute alike of genuine imagination and fancy. Almost all his flights and figures, consequently, are forced, and many of them false. He is never an eagle—
"Sailing in supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air"—
he is only a kite, with keen eye, but heavy body, laboriously beating on his way through the reluctant ether. Occasionally he excels in antithesis, and it had been wonderful if he had not, in the use of a figure he so frequently employs; but most of his antitheses are exceedingly strained.
The oratory of Sheridan labored, however, under still more vital defects. It did, indeed, at times exhibit strong sense; and, when the speaker was content to keep along his proper level, it contained much that was pointed and forcible. Take the following, for instance, in defense of the French Revolutionists:
"We had unsettled their reason, and then reviled their insanity; we drove them to the extremities that produced the evils we arraigned; we baited them like wild beasts, until at length we made them so. The conspiracy of Pilnitz, and the brutal threats of the royal abettors of that plot against the rights of nations and of men, had, in truth, to answer for all the additional misery, horrors, and iniquity which had since disgraced and incensed humanity. Such has been your conduct toward France, that you have created the passions which you persecute; you mark a nation to be cut off from the world; you covenant for their extermination; you swear to hunt them in their inmost recesses; you load them with every species of execration; and you now come forth with whining declamations on the horror of their turning upon you with the fury which you inspired."
This is good, strong writing; but the acute reader will notice that it is guilty of that literary offense of which Burke has been unjustly accused—that of amplification. The changes are rung too long upon one idea. But Sheridan not only amplifies all his thoughts, but his thought is never profound or philosophical. He has no deep meditative current flowing through his mind. He never sees the general in the particular. To Burke it did not matter what topic he took up. He could extract poetry and philosophical truth from each and all. Were it the salt duties, he could have made us hear the surges of the old and ever-sounding sea; were it tobacco, he would have invoked the shade of Sir Walter Raleigh, and brought out all the philosophy of physical excitement; were it the Stamp Act, the forests of America would have been heard rustling in his eloquence, as in a north-westerly autumn wind; and were it a duty on rice, the dusky shining face of Hindostan would have been personified and pictured as looking on upon the discussion; and all this would have been so managed, as to rise naturally out of the inferior subject, and to reflect light upon it. Of this Sheridan was incapable. To him
"A primrose by the river's brim,
A yellow primrose was to him;
And it was nothing more."
He could only have sewed awkwardly certain purpurei panni about the theme, which would have fluttered gaudily around it, and made both it and the speaker ridiculous.
Our last charge against Sheridan's oratory shall be the strongest. He was not deeply it in earnest. Every great orator, according to an ancient critic, should be a good man. Sheridan was not a good man—hardly even a fine fellow. He was only a clever actor. He could not say, "I believed, therefore have I spoken." He had no profound convictions on any subject; and hence he was alike intellectually and morally a light-horseman. What earnest, commanding eloquence could be expected from a man whose most congenial atmosphere was the stage, and much of whose oratory consisted of scraps from plays? Of religion he seems to have been entirely destitute, and many have doubted even his political sincerity. He was, of course, capable of spleen, of personal pique, and even of a certain patriotic emotion; and all these he at different times expressed in an eloquent and effective manner. But he had no devouring, consuming enthusiasm about any thing or person, not even about himself; for, to do him justice, he was the least in the world of an egotist. He cared for his gratifications, but not, properly speaking, for himself. He had no pride, and his vanity was not very excessive. It was far more true of him than of Dr. Johnson, that "if he had found a field of clover, he would have rolled in it." He was constitutionally a good-natured sensualist; and all his mental efforts, and some of his deeper errors, arose from the necessity of supplying the wants of his sensualism. He wrote the "School for Seandal" to procure means for his extravagance and debauchery, and he betrayed the Whigs, that he might continue to enjoy the good dinners and the rich wines of the Prince Regent's table.
This is not the place for entering at large upon his political career. Mr. Moore in his Biography has elaborately defended it. And yet he admits, that more than once Sheridan sacrificed his principles to his interest, and that his conduct to Lords Grey and Grenville was altogether unjustifiable; that Burke withdrew from him in disgust; and that even Fox, toward the end, entirely lost confidence in his integrity. His character, in fact, latterly, was that of a political swindler—a miserable tool to the prince who first deserted, and insulted him at last by proffers of help when it was too late. We have much excuse for his circumstances and temperament; but this can not, and ought not to blind us to the total want of principle and reckless breach of promise exhibited by him on many occasions; and we can not but resent indignantly Moore's tenderness to Sheridan's political errors, while he speaks with such unjust harshness of what he calls Burke's "tergiversation."
Looking back from our present point of view at the French Revolution, which formed the point of divergence between Burke and Windham, and Fox and Sheridan, we can not say that we sympathize entirely with the views and conduct of either party. Both went to extremes, by judging of the great experiment ere it was half finished. Burke and Windham allowed their ardent temperament and strong decided opinions to hurry them into extravagant fears of the tendencies of democracy--fears partly, indeed, justified by the Moloch butcheries of the Reign of Terror. Fox and Sheridan, on the contrary, preached little less than resistance and rebellion to the legal and regulated powers of the British monarchy. The first two yoked themselves as coursers to draw the chariot of power—the others allowed themselves to be carried in triumph on the shoulders of mobs. As is usually the ease, the followers of both "bettered their instruction," and pushed their views and language ad absurdum. Arthur Young, Horseley, Reeves, and others, openly supported despotic principles, and spoke of the people as having nothing to do with the laws but to obey them, while Thomas Paine, Godwin, and a large host of others, promulgated opinions which, if carried out, would have destroyed the foundations of all civil society. Some, on the other hand, of great mark, stood between the two extremes, and inclined alternately to both.
Perhaps our tone toward Sheridan in the previous remarks may appear rather harsh. And when we remember his melancholy end, we are tempted to think so ourselves.
It was a very sad tragedy, that of Saville Row. There was to be seen the man on whose lips senators and vast multitudes had hung, whose jests had shaken Old Drury from top to bottom, till it was one mass of loosened laughter, lying in bed, broken in constitution and in heart, deriving his chief consolation and strength from the potion which had degraded and ruined him; deserted by his noble friends, ministered to indeed by his wife, whose early love, much tried and long cooled, had revived in its original strength for this hour of darkness and distress, but with no hope on earth, and with but a cold and dim prospect beyond the grave; surrounded by duns, and with difficulty saved from being carried in his blankets to a sponging-house—behold the end of the admired, flattered, overrated, underrated, spoiled, and murdered Sheridan! And yet, in six days, what spectacle is it that we see darkening the streets of London? It is a funeral, and certainly it must be a royal personage whom they are bearing to the grave, for royal dukes and belted earls, and lord bishops, and celebrated statesmen, and wits, and orators are crowding there. No! it is the funeral of that very same shivering, starving, wretch—of the wreck that was once Sheridan! Surely that funeral was the mockery of hell! Let us shut the disgusting scene by quoting the indignant lines of his biographer:
"Oh! it sickens the heart to see bosoms so hollow,
And friendship so false in the great and high-born;
To think what a long line of titles may follow
The relics of him who died friendless and lorn!
"How proud they can press to the funeral array
Of him whom they shunn'd in his sick-bed and sorrow!
How bailiffs may seize his last blanket to-day,
Whose pall shall be held up by nobles to-morrow!"
This is all very true and all very deplorable, and yet we can not close this paper without drawing the strong moral, that had Sheridan been true to himself, neither the insult of noble neglect or the deeper insult of noble patronage had befallen him. Had he lost his seat in Parliament on account of his political integrity, and not on account of his want of it; had he hurt his constitution, as Burke did, by incessant labor, and not by habitual excess; had he been less of a parasite, a better, a rake, and a liar; had he put less faith in the favor and false smiles of a worthless prince; had he known and acted on the noble lines—
"Know prudent, cautious, self-control
Is wisdom's root"—
then what a different life had he led, what a different death had he died, and what a different memory had he left to his country and his kind!