"JACOB OMNIUM," THE AMATEUR JOURNALIST.
THE little memoir just published by Sir W. S. Maxwell will revive for a moment the old dispute as to the true intel- lectual character of " Jacob Omnium." There probably never was a man who looked more benign than the "gentle giant" of six- feet-eight who bore in literature that nickname, and there have been few whose writings have aroused in opponents more bitterness of dislike. His present biographer, while heartily eulogising his friend, admits that he was often condemned as cynical, and it would, we think, be difficult for those who judge him by his writings alone to believe that he was as his face suggested, and as much of his career seems to demonstrate, one of the most benevolent of mankind. The truth seems to be that Mr. Matthew Higgins, inheriting the genial and patient temper so often ' found in men of unusual proportions, living what must have been one of the happiest lives ever led by mortal, and possessing a nature strongly moved by the sight of injustice or oppression, had also in him an immense and sometimes ill-directed fund of intellectual contempt. The capacities of kindliness and of scorn are not always disunited, and in "Jacob Omnium" there was, we suspect, a conscious pride in and enjoyment of both, which led him, when angry, to be very blind to the literary sin of exaggeration. Not only just but merciful in his judgments on men who were not his opponents—as, for example, on horse-dealers and couriers, whom in this book he defends with equal sense and tolerance—he was apt to scorn his adversaries, and to scorn them with a sort of delight in the scorn itself which sometimes made him unjust, and raised the feeling that he fought at least as much for his own victory as for that of his cause. This enjoyment in contempt was the more curious, because it is usually a quality of the unhappy, and Mr. Higgins was very happy indeed. He liked himself very much, as the children say, and he had found a career which singularly suited him. He had no need to work, he liked an easy life, and yet he had an admirable vent for his intellectual energies. He had found out a method of doing good while leading the rich London idler's life. There never was a man so happily situated for the profession he adopted,—that of an amateur journalist. Very rich for his wants, and thoroughly educated, independent almost from infancy, and from family circumstances accustomed to travel and to cosmopolitan society, he touched the great world at many points, was well received everywhere, and knew almost without effort not only what was going on, but what among the things going on really interested society. He possessed, moreover, in a high degree—as an accident revealed to him—a faculty rare even among the ablest litterateurs, that of stating a case, and es- pecially a case of complaint, so that it seemed unanswerable. His lucidity was perfect, and he had a way of colouring his facts by sheer brightness of statement, so that while seeming most moderate and unimpassioned he produced all the effect for which inferior men are indebted to their command of rhetoric, and the resources of invective. He could exaggerate, and did, while appearing to himself as well as others studiously to avoid exaggeration. Thus armed, he tried to enter Parliament, where, we think, he would have succeeded ; and failing, betook himself thence- forward to another line,—that of an amateur journalist, a man who, writing when he pleased on such subjects only as struck his fancy, could always command a place in the most powerful journals, and always attract,the public ear. His plan was usually to pose not as spectator, but as victim of the injustice, and he repeatedly, by mere skill in exposure, terminated a considerable wrong. For example, there can be no doubt that he destroyed, in a single letter, the last Court in England, the Palace Court, in which justice was openly set at nought, and the plaintiff always won ; that he gave a death-blow to many of the abuses of the old Public-School system ; and that he first roused the opinion which resulted, years after, in the abolition of Army Purchase. His great powers, however, were not always wisely used. As we have said, al- though the motive-power which roused him was almost always moral indignation, and especially indignation at the ill-treatment of the feeble, he bad in his intellect, though not in his nature, a tendency to scorn which sometimes made him intellectually an oppressor. Nothing could have been finer, granted his view of the facts, than his conduct in the Mhow Court-Martial ; or more startling than the power he wielded on that occasion over public opinion. With no hold over politicians, without even a place in Parliament, he defied the strongest prejudice of the Army—its intense desire to uphold discipline, even when overstrained—and compelled an unwilling Government to allow a trial, till then unparal- leled in its expense, merely to punish oppression exercised upon a non-commissioned officer by the Colonel commanding his regiment. The trial was a triumph for the pen as an instrument of government, but it will, we fancy, be acknowledged by all im- partial persons that he had over-stated his case, and that the court-martial on Colonel Crawley was mainly useful as showing that in the British Army no rank and no combination of circum- stances could shield an officer accused of deliberate oppres- sion. " Jacob Omnium," however, remained to the last of his original opinion—never saw that he had from the highest motives made an error, and resented, as he showed in his controversy with Mr. T. Hughes in our columns, any attack upon his share in the trial with an acerbity quite inconsistent with his character for benignity. Whatever else he was, in the Crawley case he was not benign, and his conduct in the whole affair, like his tone in many of his writings, revealed the possibility of considerable intellectual bitterness existing in a very large and in many aspects decidedly noble character. He would not have hit the innocent for the world, but neither would he measure his punishment to the guilty. There is another instance of the same intellectual defect in the little book before us. It was like Mr. Higgins to be deeply moved by the Irish famine, to throw himself heart and soul into the work of relief, to give his personal aid as well as his money, —to be consumed, as it were, by a passion of pity for the wretched victims whom he saw dying naked in the roads of Mayo. No human being could have behaved more nobly than he did in the famine. But it was like him, too, to express first of all his feeling in the correspondence printed here, and which breathes nothing but contemptuous indignation at the conduct of the Irish squire- archy. Thackeray in his most savage mood never wrote so dreadful a description as that of "The Mulligan of Ballymulligan," who may have been all he was described, but whom Mr. Higgins denounced, not only for atrocious severity in the exaction of rent, but for not aiding the people, though in the same letter he admits that " The Mulligan " was a bankrupt, in hiding from the law. He ought not to have been a bankrupt, and ought not to have been in hiding for his own crimes, but still his powerlessness, though self-produced, does not deepen the crime of not assisting his tenantry with unproduceable means. The correspondence leaves scarcely a better impression of "Mr. Black "—all the names are fictitious—whom Mr. Higgins evidently considered a hard-hearted villain, while himself stating, from his own point of view, facts which prima facie show the very contrary. Mr. Black owned 60,000 acres, with a population of 12,000 souls, and let them at £2,500 a year. His agent was a kind and com- petent man, but Mr. Higgins attacked the landlord furiously for not keeping his people alive. He says SIR,—If you will re-read the letter which I had the honour of addressing you, you will see that I made no reflections whatever either on the manner in which you had thought fit to conduct your estates in Arderry in past years, or on the conduct of your agent, of whom I know nothing, save that he had made no arrangements for availing himself of the facilities which the Government and the British Association had afforded you for supplying your tenants with seed. I h5vo just had an interview with him. Ho freely admits that the high price of provisions has rendered your tenants penniless, that they are daily dying of star- vation, and that the only instructions he has received from you are to confine his expenditure for their relief to any sums he may hencefor- ward wring from them. He corroborates the information which I had already received, that this town and about 60,000 acres of land, with a population of 12,000 souls, belong to you, at a rent-roll of £2,500 a year, part of which is from a year to a year and a half in arrear ; that in 1846 a sum of .E70 was expended on your account in labour for your own benefit; and that since January 1st your charities over your entire property here are comprised in the sum of £15, granted to the soup- kitchen of Letterbrick."
That is a terrible indictment, but even as stated, it shows that Mr. Black had not exacted his rents for a year and a half. It is admitted in another paragraph that in the previous year he had only received two-fifths of his income, and that for back-rents; and the strong words we have italicised are, if read in Mr. Black's favour, equivalent to an order to the agent to spend the whole rental obtainable from the property on the relief of the people upon it. Mr. Black may have been a rich man, for what we know, and bound to open a separate purse for the relief of his tenantry ; or an unencumbered one, and bound to mortgage his property to obtain money for them ; but there is nothing on the
face of the charge to show that he had wealth, or could raise money on land so situated, and on a scale which might have made a philanthropist despair. To supply the mere food of the unhappy people would have cost at a shilling a day per household, £840 a week. If Mr. Black was in the least like most Irish landlords at the time, living on the proceeds of an encumbered though wide estate, crushed by the Poor-rate, what could he do more than surrender all his rents to the starving people, who, so far from suffering by his " wringing " of rent from those who could pay, benefited by it? Ile could not " wring " it from the starving. Mr. Higgins may have known facts which made his case infinitely worse than his statement, but on the face of the record he gave, for the sake of those whom he pitied, a terribly harsh judgment upon the conduct of those whom he scorned. We think that he did so frequently ; that his luta- ! lect, when at white-heat, became so scornful as to be incapable of apprehending fully the qualifying circumstances in the conduct of those whose action roused, and often justly roused, his moral indignation. That was the one fault, as it seems to us, in a mind of singular power, always employed by its possessor to defend, so far as he might, the weak from the injustice of the strong.
It is apart from the subject, but there is a paper in this collec- tion which is quite new to us, and about which we have a historical curiosity. Is the astounding story headed " Captain Jack" a romance, or is it a narrative of an event which Mr. Higgins believed to have occurred in Demerara in 182:1? It is difficult to think of " Jacob Omnium" writing fiction, and nearly as difficult to believe that so astounding an act of tyranny could have passed in a British Colony unnoticed or unpunished.
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