MR. COLERIDGE.
UR. COLERIDGE is the most mellifluous orator in the I House of Commons. Without either the massiveness of Mr. Bright or the eagerness of Mr. Gladstone, he has a persuasive- ness of his own which is perhaps not the less for wanting the solidity of the most eloquent of our orators, and the intense earnestness of the most subtle of our statesmen. Mr. Cole- ridge is, we think, the only man in Parliament whose address and elocution recall the favourite Greek metaphors for oratory, —the " feathered " or " winged words " of Homer's habitual phrase, and the special simile in which the same great poet makes Helen describe the characteristics of the rhetoric of Ulysses,—" the words that fall like flakes of wintry snow." It is not often that eloquent speech suggests of itself a process of nature so noiseless. The effort of a great speaker to reach the minds and hearts of his hearers must, as a rule, contain in it more of force and vibration than is consistent with such an image as that. Mr. Bright's slow, rich voice, to which the hoarseness of his later years, when not overwhelming, often adds a singularly expressive effect of undaunted struggle against the political elements,—and Mr. Gladstone's slight Northern burr, expressing, as it does, the superabundance of vital energy with which every detail of his exposition, and every discrimination of his thought, is crusted, could never for a moment suggest to any ear the image of falling snowflakes. Resisting media of different kinds are implied in the voices and deliveries of both speakers. Mr. Bright's makes one feel that almost the stars in their courses have fought against Sisera, and that Sisera is not dismayed. Mr. Gladstone's suggests constant mental pressure on every point and atom of his subject,—pressure always, and a careful sub- division of the pressure sometimes. But Mr. Coleridge's oratory flows and falls without the sense of any effort, whether directed against external obstacles, or towards the due appor- tionment and measure of his own energies. It enters the mind of his hearers almost imperceptibly. Its effect may be great, for so may that of a liquid which steals into the rifts of the rocks till they are full to overflowing and the granite itself is rent asunder by its gradually cumulated pressure. But the process is not perceived until the result makes it manifest. Perhaps, however, this comparison is a shade too favourable to the manner of Mr. Coleridge's oratory,— for to steal into the mind without even calling attention to the manner, is certainly the highest of all forms of that art which conceals art. Mr. Coleridge's manner does not quite achieve this. He is, as we said, mellifluous. There is a shade of something honeyed about his deliveryand his style which just discriminates it from the perfection of impersonal persuasiveness. He is not only suave, but sweet. And this is a characteristic which belongs not simply to his delivery, but to his style. He can scarcely be said to be flowery ; but except in his very best efforts,—such efforts as that of yesterday week,—he runs a risk of being luscious, as when in one of his speeches on the Oxford Test Abolition Bill he expressed his earnest desire that " like the light which broke over the aisles of Melrose from the tomb of Michael Scott, the lamp of liberty may be so tended in the University of Oxford as to send forth its bene- ficent rays over the whole of Christendom." It is this danger of his style which makes so simple, nervous, and closely knit, and yet so marvellously liquid and flowing a speech as that of yesterday week an indisputable evidence of Mr. Coleridge's power over himself, and capacity to resist the temptation of honeyed speech. The ancients, to whom pleasure always seemed a more important end than it can to us, regarded honeyed words as the highest triumph of persuasive art. With us, not unnaturally or unfortunately, it is not so. An infusion of honey, while it may please, yet inspires too much conscious- ness, and excites too much distrust, for perfect oratory. Mr. Coleridge is, we think, aware of this, and when he takes most pains, dispenses most with the superfluous sweetness of his. natural style.
The type of Mr. Coleridge's Liberalism is to a certain extent. represented in the style of his musical and fluent speech. He is a Liberal of the thoughtful and spiritual school, with a slight bias towards ornate ecclesiasticism,—and a great aver- sion towards the naked and coarse utilitarianism of Mr. Lowe. One of his best speeches in the House of Commons, delivered daring the Reform debates of 1866, was in answer to Mr. Lowe's emphatic panegyric on all that feeds a material civili- zation. Mr. Coleridge evidently felt something of the wrath which his great relative Samuel Taylor Coleridge felt on a like occasion, when he said that " the distinguished and world- honoured company of Christian Mammonists appeared to the eye of his imagination as a drove of camels, heavily laden, yet all at full speed, and each in the confident expectation of pass- ing through the eye of the needle,' without stop or halt, both beast and baggage." Mr. Coleridge has indeed preserved for the Parliament of our generation not a few of the character- istics of this great poet and critic, both intellectual and physical,—though the great genius, of course, is not there ; but, on the other hand, for the lax fibre of the Highgate sage's speculative and irresolute nature, we find substituted the successful lawyer's well disciplined and closely ordered thought. The theological turn, the hatred of materialism, the liberality that springs from transcendental rather than from latitudinarian views, but which cannot tolerate for a moment the narrow grooves of English Evangelicalism and literalism, the historical tone in treating of politics, the speculative insight into character, and, finally, the intellectual humour, of the great Coleridge, have all left at least their traces in the man who is likely to be, we presume, our next Liberal Attorney-General. The forehead, too, "profound, though not severe,"-
" And the pale face that seemed undoubtedly As if a blooming face it ought to be," are physical traces of the " noticeable man with large grey eyes," whom Wordsworth has painted in colours that will never fade. And if but few of S. T. Coleridge's failings are dis- coverable in the modern politician, there is, perhaps, just a shade of that tendency to sway a little from side to side in thought, which,—of course essential to the critic,—Carlyle has so humorously described in the excess to which it was carried by the author of the Ancient Mariner. At least Mr. Coleridge's strong outburst of Liberal theology in the
debate of last year on the Oxford Test Bill, was certainly curiously balanced by a profession of obedience to the teach- ing of the Church that was almost abject in its submissive-
ness, in a subsequent speech to his constituents at Exeter. " Can any fair man doubt," he asked, on the 6th of March,
1867, in the House of Commons, " that the Thirty-Nine Articles are costing us very dear It is becoming more and more plain year by year, that it will not do to tie down the religious belief and religious philosophy of the nineteenth century within the bands of the technical phraseology of the sixteenth." But in October of the same year he told his con- stituents at Exeter that " to the Church as a religious teacher he submitted humbly as a child :" " I am her child and pupil, and devotedly attached to her authority,"—which certainly ought to mean, if it means anything, that he accepted her iorraulm as authoritative, and the Thirty-Nine Articles of course amongst them, as the most expressly authoritative of all. Thus there seems to us a certain variability of outline in Mr. Coleridge's theological Liberalism, which may suggest an inward indecision of view.
But if he can remind us at times of some of the infirmities which are associated with the greatest of his name and kindred, he reminds us even more of some of the finer characteristics of the same great mind. Coleridge was far superior to the philosophical Liberals of his time in this, that he never could :sever political theory from political history, and added the immense weight of his authority to that school of politics which -strove rather to develop the Liberal elements which history 'has transmitted to us, than to set up abstract theories which would demand a clean sweep and a reconstruction de novo. And there has been nothing better in Mr. Coleridge's speeches than his carefully historic view of the antecedents of the questions he has discussed. In the great speech of yesterday week on the Irish Church, the most striking feature was the firm historical groundwork which he laid for his argument. His proof from the Acts of Mortmain that the State has always regarded property given for religious uses as -subject to its special control, and his quotation from the Irish Secretary's despatch in the reign of Elizabeth asking that -soldiers should be sent as Bishops for the Irish dioceses, because -only soldiers would be of any use in preserving order in Ire- land, were both remarkable evidences of Mr. Coleridge's keen eye for the historical side of his question : the one showing that we are not breaking with the past in regulating with a • sole view to the benefit of the public the property of the Irish Church,—the other showing from how deep and complex a root of violence the Protestant Establishment in Ireland has :grown up. There has been, too, in more than one of Mr. Coleridge's =speeches not a little evidence of speculative insight into the -character of his friends or opponents. His remark on Mr. Disraeli's injustice in accusing himself of "heedless rhetoric," 4' heedless is the last thing that he ever was or could be,"— .or, indeed, of responsibility for any saying which was not 'carefully calculated for a purpose,—whether wisely or un- wisely calculated is another matter,—and again, his corre- sponding criticism last year at Exeter on his own leader, the leader of Opposition, that Mr. Gladstone had all the virtues and knowledge qualifying for government except, perhaps, a certain kind of knowledge of the world and of evil,—we forget Mr. Coleridge's precise term,—which it was sometimes most dangerous to be deficient in,—were both equally just and discriminating. If there is something of Coleridgian hesitation about Mr. Coleridge, there is a touch of Coleridgian critical faculty too.
And there is, too, in the rising lawyer of the House of Commons a trace of that intellectual patience which is so rare in advanced Liberals, and so useful too, when it does not really diminish their energy for any good work, but only helps them to resign themselves to await quietly the slow harvests of political nature. It was this pathetic and, in that case, far too passive patience, in the great Samuel Taylor which made Wordsworth speak of him almost as of a gifted dumb animal, " the Heaven-eyed creature." It was this, too, which showed itself in that humorous anecdote of Carlyle's, illustrative of Coleridge's piety, that when Mrs. Gilman feared his tea was quite cold, Coleridge replied, "A great deal better than I deserve, ma'am,—a great deal better than I deserve !" Piety of that somewhat over-patient type would scarcely be a good feature in a rising Reformer, and Mr. Coleridge has never shown any tendency to acquiesce in evils which admit a remedy. On the Oxford Test question he has surpassed the hopes of his friends in the thoroughness of his policy, and on both Reform and the Irish Church he has been amongst the foremost. But his fine peroration yesterday week could not but remind us of his great relative's patient, acquiescent type of pious Liberalism. He was not disposed, he said, to believe in the disestablishment of the Irish Church, or in any one just measure, as a panacea. " We learn in time, sorrowfully but surely, how little good can be effected by the highest genius and the greatest virtue, in the lapse of the longest life com- monly accorded to man." This, however, should be no motive for stupid acquiescence in a state of things ad- mitted to be bad, but rather for pressing on " unhasting, unresting," casting " the good seed in faith, and leaving to a far higher than human power to fix the season for reaping the grain and the time for gathering into barns." That might have been said by many Liberals of whom it would yet not have been in the least characteristic. We believe it is charac- teristic of the essential type of Mr. Coleridge's Liberalism ; and that type, at once earnest for prompt justice, and yet patient of small results and long delays, is one rare enough and important enough to open for him, if he fulfils the pro- mise of his first years in Parliament, a brilliant and noble political career.
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