SIR GEORGE JESSEL.
ONE of the greatest administrative forces in England has disappeared with Sir George Jesse]. A more extra- ordinary intellectual engine than his brain has not been seen at work in our generation. Great as he was as a pure lawyer, he was still greater in the despatch of business ; for the speed, and the marvellous accuracy on the whole with which he worked at so great a speed, were certainly neither rivalled nor approached by any contemporary of his own. People called him a very strong man, and so he was, but in his own line his swiftness was more marvellous than his strength, and, indeed, sometimes misled him, though it would hardly be just to say that the State would have gained by any subtraction from that speed, for his mistakes were rare and trivial in proportion to the efficiency of the industry which his great. velocity of thought enabled him to achieve. He was what Carlyle would have called " a great captain of industry," only the industry in which he was a captain was a learned industry of a very high order of delicacy and skill, which it took a man of very singular attainments to superintend, and hasten, and arrest., and appreciate, with Sir George Jessel's rareness of dis- crimination. He had usually mastered the drift of an argument
before it was half out of the Counsel's mouth, and had taken in the exact drift of a deed before any other man would have got at its general scope and tendency. The immense self-con- fidence with which he was obviously endowed was in his case not, as it so often is, the result of a misleading sanguineness and eagerness of temperament, which makes a man leap before he looks, but simply the self-confidence of a mind which had found its anticipations fully verified ten times or oftener for every case of failure. And the evidence of this was that Sir George Jessel never even wished to persevere in maintaining a false position, when once he had discovered it. He was always anxious to acknowledge and correct a mistake, for error was vexatious to him not because it was he who had been wrong, but simply because it was error. He had one of those vigorous minds which delight in orderly arrangement, and are almost more scandalised to find a fact classified wrongly, if it is their own mistake, than they are if it be the mistake of another. Imperious as he was in guiding the deliberations or arguments of others, it was the imperiousness of a true genius for despatch of business, not the imperiousness of self-will. We should like to have seen him tried as Speaker of the House of Commons, though opinion is as yet hardly ripe for so strong a curb-rein as his over the unbridled loquacity of some Mem- bers of the House of Commons. Still, those who could force him to consider any point which he had really overlooked, were always rewarded by finding that he did not make light of its bearing simply because he had happened to overlook it. His impatience was the impatience of a keen, swift mind, scandalised by any needless waste of labour, not of an excitable mind irritated by opposition. Indeed, no opposition that was firm and lucid ever ruffled him in the least. In this respect, he had the true judicial temper. He would always insist on recognising the strong points of the view he rejected, as distinctly as he recog- nised the strong points of the view he adopted. We may, per- haps, rightly call a mind of this kind imperious, if it rides rough- shod over weaker and slower intellects, and to this extent Sir George Jessel was imperious. But it was, strictly speaking, the imperiousness of high faculty measuring itself against what usually proved to be weaker faculty, not the imperiousness of prestige, audacity, or caprice. Indeed, of caprice there was not a trace in the Master of the Rolls, and of the sense of his own prestige, and of audacity, only so much as must accompany more or less the consciousness of singularly high powers.
Of course, these powers were limited in number, though they were, speaking comparatively, almost unlimited in degree. Sir George Jessel had not, like the great Jewish con- temporary who achieved a still higher fame in politics, any unique insight into other men. He was not skilful in the use of social weapons. He had no great stores of banter or wit at his command. His speeches in Parliament were not of the first order, even for the speeches of a Solicitor-General. He was not as persuasive as Sir Henry James, nor any- thing like as lucid in the exposition of political issues as Sir Farrer Herschell. Marvellous as his powers were, they were probably never shown to less advantage than during his short Parliamentary career. For in the forms of things he was not
a master. He was deficient in tact, in the art of literary and popular exposition ; and appeals to feelings he either despised or could not understand. Even as a lawyer, he had not that command of caustic and ironic dialectic which gave to some of his earlier contemporaries, like Lord Westbury and Vice- Chancellor Knight Bruce, so unique a fame. Sir George Jessel's intellect went straight to the subject-matter of legal issues, and never wasted time with the apparel in which they were dressed up. He was a Titan in his way, but part of his force consisted in his inability to deal with the mere super- ficial forms of argument, and the necessity he felt himself under of going straight to the true issue. That is why we ventured to call him a captain of industry ; for he always sought to economise industry to the utmost, and probably it would be difficult to find any two of his contemporaries, how- ever eminent, who, taken together, got through so much sound' work in the same time as he did, without ever knowing appa- rently what overwork meant. His appetite for work was some- thing vast. Nothing pleased him better, when he came to the end of one heavy task, than at once to undertake another which he might easily have declined. The spectacle of his last struggle with a mortal disease was something more than impressive. For many weeks he discharged every duty, not only in his Court, but in relation to volunteer offices for omitting which he could well have pleaded illness, and this when he was so dangerously ill that to take a step upstairs without assistance was impossible, and when at times it was an effort to him to speak at all. When urged by- his doctors to keep quiet, he pleaded that he was more equal to work than he was to idleness, and that he should be better if he shrank from none of his usual duties. And for a time,
— though he recovered much of his old energy towards the end, — he went through all his judicial and administrative and academical duties,—he was Vice-Chancellor of his own University, the University of London,—with punctual pre-- cision, though looking like the ghost of himself, labouring under the oppression of more than one organic disease, and threatened by that failure of the heart of which in the end he died. To see that wonderful engine in his brain working at half, or less than half, its usual pressure of steam, as the life in him flickered low during the struggle of his powerful frame with the last enemy, was a strange, a paisfssie-mula but in some sense an inspiring sight for commoner and weaker' mortals. There was something of the Hercules in Sir George Jessel.
Sir George Jessel was a curiously accomplished man, at College both a first-rate mathematician and a good classic, —that he was a considerable Hebrew scholar was, perhaps, not remarkable, considering his race and faith,—otherwise also a good linguist, and at one time he had a good and scientific knowledge of botany, as well, we believe, as of others of the classificatory sciences. Indeed, part of his grasp of law was due not only to the immense keen- ness and swiftness of his general intellect, but to his marked capacity for sound classification. His ability was, however, all in•'
the region of what is called positive knowledge. He had little taste and little special capacity for philosophy or literature, though he was so strong a man that there was no subject on which he had informed himself at all on which his judgment was without value. However, it was for his swift and accurate discharge of the highest judicial work that he will be best and most justly remembered. In our time, there has been no adminis- trative engine so marvellous in its achievements, so strong, and yet so accurate, as the judicial power of Sir George Jessel.
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