LORD WESTBURY.
LORD WESTBURY'S intellect, though it was not backed by that kind of character which is so much more than intellect in political life, is a genuine loss to the country. He was not only a great lawyer, but something more, a man of great lucidity of apprehension in relation to almost every intel- lectual question with which he had to deal. If the happy phrases to which he gave currency were collected, we believe that they would be at once recognized as a real addition to the effi- ciency of our classical English. By way of illustration, we need only refer to a sarcasm which is now in almost everybody's mouth, and which certainly originated with Lord Westbury, who described a vacillation of purpose in some noble but stupid client of his in the Court of Chancery, by saying that "Lord — had changed what he was pleased to call his mind," a phrase which admirably brings home to one how much passes under the name of mind, which would be much better described as the want of mind. The intellectual cruelty for which Lord Westbury was given credit was indeed little more than inability or reluctance to spoil the precision and point of his criticisms for the sake of sparing somebody's feel- ings. And such cruelty is of real use to such an Assembly as the House of Lords. If we could but have a voice, not em- bodied in a person, which would pass on all human blunders the sharply-defined kind of judgments which Lord Westbury passed, and with as little real malignity, we could hardly over-rate its uses. The worst of it, when this is done for us by a human being not himself exempt from either error or unworthy motive, is that the sarcasms don't prove as intellectually instructive as they otherwise would be, —being referred to any cause except that of apt intellectual discernment. Nevertheless, Lord Westbury was of very great use to the House of Lords for the same reason which so often made his phrases pass into the current language of the day,—that he had the kind of precision of thought and speech which made the words he chose precisely the best adapted in the world to make people feel the extent of their own intel- lectual delinquencies. When he argued for the Supple- mental Article to the Alabama Treaty last year, on the ground that it did at least modify a bad treaty for the better, and afford something more solid than " a series of understandings in which nothing had been understood, and a series of explanations in which nothing had been ex- plained," he summed up the facts of the case in a few words which were not epigrammatic only because they were so precisely fitted to the facts ; and when he said that " two or three words proceeding from an intelligent mind " would have made the Supplemental Article quite conclusive, he passed, in satirical fashion no doubt, but with exquisite neat- ness, the best possible criticism on that studied vagueness of lan- guage which happened to snit best the diplomacy of the moment. Precision was always the sting of Lord Westbury's sarcasm,—
a precision of language which he over-acted in the excessive precisianism of his articulation and delivery. And there is no kind of sarcasm which is more really for the good of our public men (if they would only believe it), than this,— none which has more tendency to bring home to them the superfluity of many of their doings, and the strictly spontaneous character of some of their fatigues. No doubt " two or three words proceeding from an intelligent mind " would be quite sufficient to dispose of a vast number of difficulties which public men make for themselves by their inability or reluctance to speak such words. And this being so, Lord Westbury'e loss is a loss that will not be easily supplied, for very few men have the same faculty of thinking remarks that trace the very course of the ailing nerve which threads a subject of confused dispute, and still less of blurting them out almost without any power of concealment, even when they are a great deal too true to be pleasant. It was Lord Westbury's genius to put things simply,—so simply that the form alone had almost as much effect as the substance. When he said, for instance, in criticising the Collier appointment, that the Lord Chancellor in appointing Sir R. Collier to the Common Pleas might have truly said, "I am doing that which is quite right and within my power," and that the Prime Minister, in appointing a judge of the Com- mon Pleas to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, might accurately have said, " I am doing that which is quite right and within my power," and yet that "these two rights made together an insufferable wrong," and " these two acts of public propriety constituted the grave im- propriety which they were then discussing," he really put the Collier scandal in the fewest possible words, and those few, words presenting most distinctly the defence of the Govern- ment, while asserting in the strongest terms the total inade- quacy of that defence.
No doubt there was something of a mincing tone in the substance no less than in the form of Lord Westbury's criti- cisms. There was an assumption of fastidious intellectual nicety and refinement in his speeches, which was ill borne out by the facts of his career, and this weakened even the intellectual effect of his criticism. In the scandals which caused his resignation in 1865, almost everyone now admits that he was free from all imputations of personal corruption, and indeed that his devotion to the public service was, in many senses, at least as great as that of the ablest of his pre- decessors and successors. But it is impossible to regard him as a scrupulous Chancellor. It is indeed evident on his own con- fession that when questions of moral responsibility were brought before him, he felt so unequal to them, that he exhausted every device by which he could divest himself of the moral burden. He referred his duty towards Mr. Edmunds to Lords Kingsdown and Cranworth, and acted upon their advice with almost ostentatious punctiliousness. He made it his principle to do "nothing against Mr. Edmunds but what public duty required," and he judged of what public duty required, by the opinions of other persons than himself. He made it a point " neither to form nor express an opinion " of his own on the matter. If he virtually sanctioned Mr. Edmunds's course in taking a retiring pension for vacating a place in the House of Lords which one of his own sons,—a very competent man,—filled up, there seems every reason to believe that his motive was not less or even more a genuine kindliness for the retiring clerk, than any wish to smooth the way for the promotion
of his successor. He trod recklessly on men's feelings in the intellectual licence of his criticism, but he was always anxious to spare them needless pain from any other source, and he was apt to think a good deal of the latter kind of pain needless which was really needful and salutary. Probably he hardly attached any sufficiently real ideas to moral dis- tinctions, to feel indignant against the defaulters whose cases were brought officially before him. He rather pitied himself that he had to apply an arbitrary code of offi- cial morality to such cases, and was anxious to temper it as much by leniency as any one on whose rectitude of judgment he felt he could rely would permit him. His own standard of official duty, which was high, was derived, of course, from his intellectual, not from his moral nature. He could not bear to see work inefficiently done. When he fell from power in 1865, he told the House of Lords with pardonable pilde that he had left its Appellate duties in a thoroughly satisfactkry state, only one judgment remaining undelivered. In the Court of Chancery he hoped there would not remain a single appeal un- heard or judgment undelivered, and this, though he had taken a great deal more duty on his own shoulders than most of his pre-
decessors. Corrupt influences would never have affected him on his own account, if only because he could not have endured to introduce considerations so foreign to the intellectual sub- ject with which he had to deal. Nor is the story that in his jealousy of Lord Campbell, he once directly attacked and reversed one of his own decisions which the Bar had mischievously or blunderingly referred to Lord Campbell, at all inconsistent with this sincere respect for the intel- lectual character of his work. No doubt Lord Westbury had much intellectual vanity, and could not help feeling a sincere Irak faclice against the judgments of those Chancellors for Tt.vhom he had conceived a scorn. But it does not follow at all that because he was liable to very active intellectual pre- judices which interfered with the accuracy of his own judgments, he felt the least temptation to deviate from the straight course under the influence of motives which were not intellectual at all, but of another kind. He would have scorned himself for yielding to such motives in intellectual matters, and Lord Westbury's cynicism never extended itself to the depreciation of the critical faculties on which cynicism itself depends.
Lord Westbury was not naturally a politician. With the keenest enjoyment of the science of law, national and inter- national, and a considerable speculative faculty, if he had but had time and energy to exercise it,—one was always hearing, for example, of the acuteness with which he discussed the germs
of purgatorial conceptions embodied in " 2Eneid," or of the keenness with which he criticised Mr. Darwin's theories, saying that it seemed to him quite impossible to refer the origin of the extraordinarily divergent animal forms of the world to the same creative act, the true difficulty being to refer them even to the same creative mind,—Lord Westbury had hardly belief enough in the collective life of peoples to attach much importance to any really political
question. When it suited him to enter Parliament, he adopted the popular creed with a facility that showed how little he cared for politics at all, just as he lectured to the Young Men's Christian Association at Wolverhampton, with a sense of extreme inward amusement at the ease with which he could don all the Christian assumptions and phraseology. There was, however, in politics nothing that appealed so exclusively to the intellect as to interest Lord Westbury deeply. Politics is an art rather than a science, an art which measures circumstances and oppor- tunities, and declares nothing absolutely without reference to the stage of moral education which a given people has reached. This is hardly interesting except to men whose moral sympa- thies are more or less closely identified with the effort to better those circumstances and opportunities. And Lord Westbury evidently took far more interest in the legal and international questions which arose in Parliament than in the political questions. He liked to have a quasi-scientific principle to apply to his facts. He hardly understood weigh- ing considerations of expediency and studying the symptoms of national character. But yet such an intellect as his was of the highest value,—in some sense of a higher value, in con- sequence of its deviation from the ordinary type,—in the House of Lords. Intellect pure and simple has, no doubt, a far less wide range of influence than character ; but it is still more powerful with a great many men of the world, who distrust moral instincts, and like to see what the purely intellectual judgment records. And to British politicians who follow their leaders almost implicitly on all matters of opinion, it was a rare and most useful stimulus occasionally to hear the voice of such a man as Lord Westbury,—one who applied an intellectual calculus rather than a cautious judg- ment to the questions before the House of Lords, and who had no motive for concealing the results which that calculus gave. No doubt they were often mistaken results. But his mind always contributed something of distinct light to the conditions of any problem to which he applied it, and that is much more than you can say of many earnest moralists and politi- cians who, from the most praiseworthy motives, so often darken counsel by words without knowledge. Earnestness is most use- ful to put in motion lucid thought and clear knowledge, but, as regsrds' utility to the State, these qualities without earnest- ness are far more valuable than earnestness without these quali- ties. The more earnestness there is in leaders who lead into the ditch, the worse it is for the country. But the more of lucid insight there is in critics who have no earnestness, the better it is for the country, and for the earnest men in the country as well.
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