LORD HOBART.*
THE general feeling, we suspect, among readers of these volumes will be that Lady Hobart has not gone quite the right way to work in perpetuating the memory of her husband, whom she assisted so loyally in his public work, more especially in India. It will be said that she has pat the cart before. the horse, that she ought to have given us a good deal more about Lord Hobart and a good deal less of him, that she should have devoted more pains to her biographical sketch and less to the unearthing and republication of old magazine essays on scenery, literature, finance, and politics. Who cares to know now what Lord Hobart thought of Loch Lomond, or Miss Austen, or Vanity • Essays and Miscellaneous Writings of Pere Henry, Lord Hobart, with a Eiogra hical Sketch. Edited by Mary, Lady Hobart. In 2 vols. London ; and Co. 1883. Fair, or even of Capital Punishment or the Alabama' claims ? But although this feeling may be a general one, we question if it ought to be approved of or encouraged, or if it indicates the proper attitude to adopt towards the life and work of such a man as Lord Hobart. It is rather a tribute to the impatient thirst for novelty and impressionism which is unquestionably one of the marks, but not one of the best marks, of our time. Lord Hobart was certainly not an impressionist in life, literature, or politics. He was essentially a man of scholarly tastes and of cos- mopolit in ideas—probably he would have wished to be styled an Internationalist, as he himself styled Cobden—who endeavoured to apply these ideas to the circumstances in which he found himself. The spirit of cosmopolitanism is fatal to impres- sionism ; and it was no wonder that the people (the Anglo- Indian people, that is to say) of Madras voted him " dull and incapable," when he made his first appearance among them as Governor, and resented as an evidence of a doctrinaire mind his proposal to devote to education money raised by local taxation for roads. But just as his amiability, industry, and sincere love of justice and toleration rendered him popular in Madras before his premature death of typhoid-fever in 1875, his fair- mindedness and Wordsworthian love of Nature prevented him from developing into a prig. Lord Hobart, indeed, recalls a remark of his own in his interesting, if not profound, " Chapter on the Sea." " For myself," he says, " I feel respecting the sea as a man does about some specially delightful person, by whose side he has sat at one of our much-abased English dinner-parties (at which, stiff and solemn as they are, or are said to be, you may, nevertheless, if you are lucky in your neighbour, pass an hour or two with considerable satisfaction), whose charms of face, of manners, and of mind he learns quite as much as, but no more than, the reserve of passing acquaintance will admit of his attempting to learn, but enough to send him home with a kind of half-unconscious feeling that there would be both pleasure and profit in making such a character the study of a life." But to make a study of such a character as that of Lord Hobart, one must have a great deal from as well as of him ; one must meet " a specially delightful person" at more than one dinner-party before one can under- stand or appreciate him. We cannot regret, therefore, that Lady Hobart has republished so many of her husband's papers on essentially ephemeral subjects; all but one or two, which are descriptive of scenery, are necessary to a thorough comprehension of the man. Nor is that all. Lord Hobart was not " a man of to-morrow " among either thinkers or politicians ; yet essentially, and in virtue of sheer reflectiveness and openness to new ideas, he was " a man of the afternoon." Whoever wishes to learn what was thought by "men of the after- noon " during such different controversies as those raised by the "No-Popery" and " Essays-and-Reviews " agitations, the Free- trade movement, and the American Civil War, would do well to read what Lord Hobart says in his essays, and letters both public and private.
A few words will suffice both for the manner in which Lady Hobart has discharged her task as editor and biographer, and for the main facts of her husband's career. The tone of Lady Hobart's narrative is quite unexceptionable ; the only fault to be found with her sketch is that it is too short, and that it is not sufficiently detailed. But, in truth, no life could well have been less eventful than Vere Hobart's. He was born with all the instincts of the administrator and the publicist, and from an early period was immersed in work which left leisure for in- tellectual pleasures only. The eldest son of the Rev. Augustus Hobart, the present Earl of Buckinghamshire, and a descendant of John Hampden, he was born December 8th, 1818. At an early age, and while his father was Vicar of Walton, near Loughborough, in Leicestershire, he was sent to Cheam School. The record of his Cheam days is most notable for the more than respectable verses which be contributed to the School Magazine, and speci- mens of which on such widely different subjects as " The Butterfly," "Hannibal on his Recall from Italy," " Coriolanns to Aufidins," " Rienzi," and " Arabia," are given by Lady Hobart, When a little over eighteen he went to Oxford, obtaining an open scholarship at Trinity College. Leaving College with a second-class, he went to London ; and the late Lord Ripon, then President of the Board of Trade, gave him a clerkship in that office in 1840. Two years later he accompanied Sir Henry Ellis as his secretary on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor of Brazil, but returned in a comparatively short time to his post in London, where he lived very quietly and economi-
cally, although he managed to pay off some debts he had con- tracted at Oxford. He seems to have rapidly adopted Liberal opinions both in politics and theology. Although his father was a Protectionist, he became a Free-trader, and " the first trace of any political writing is to be found in a little book of essays on Free-trade written by himself and two friends." In 1849 his father became Earl of Buckinghamshire, and he himself Lord Hobart. A considerable portion of Lady Hobart's sketch after this date consists of extracts from papers on such subjects as the No-Popery agitation and the Irish difficulties of the period, and of quotations from letters describing localities in which Hobart spent holidays. On the verge of forty the heats and the hopes of youth are generally moderated, and we find him writing on March 24th, 1857 :—
" I do not expect to rise, because I have no steady ambition. I really think (modestly enough) that I have talents which would carry me a good way—if I had the faculty of which I speak—but I have not and never had it. The truth is, I do not care to rise, or perhaps I should say I care very little about it I fear my chance of an appointment is now very small. You see I am most unfortunately placed just between the two parties, so that neither looks favourably upon me."
We also learn from Lady Hobart that her husband's "private circumstances prevented him from going into Parliament ; this impossibility was made doubly trying by the keen interest which he took in politics. He occasionally wrote, but his writing was always the result of a strong interest in the subject." One of the best of his pamphlets, on the " Law of Partnership Liability," was written in 1853. Hobart took a strong view in regard to the Crimean War, which he regarded as "stupid, brutal, useless," and did his best to influence Mr. Gladstone and (through the columns of the Times) the British public. In 1861, the Foreign Office applied to the Board of Trade for some one capable of investigating into the condition of the Turkish finances, and of advising some system for their better administration. The Mission was offered to and accepted by Lord Hobart. His Mission ended—as, of course, it was bound to do—in failure, so far as ending or mending financial anarchy in Constantinople was con- cerned. Speaking of the Turks individually, we find him saying :—
" I like them much, and find, as usual, that, in hating and despising the Turks, as we Britons do, we have only given another instance of our folly and vulgarity. But I don't think they are the least fit for the government of a great, unwieldy, heterogeneous empire."
In 1863 Hobart was able to retire from the Board of Trade on a pension. He spent a winter in Italy, and on returning to England, wrote a series of political essays. Subsequently he went a second time to Constantinople, as Director-General of the Ottoman Bank. Finally, in 1872, the Dake of Argyll, then Secretary for India, offered him the Governorship of Madras. There he laboured strenuously for three years, falling a victim to typhoid fever in 1875. He had succeeded before he died in obtaining from the general Government of India their sanction to an artificial harbour for the roadstead of Madras, and to a great scheme of sanitation for the city. After his death, a well- informed writer said :— " The natives, indeed, always liked him, both Massulman and Hindoo. He found the Mahommedans in a very depressed condition, sinking in the social scale, and neglecting education and the means of rising. But he had lived in Constantinople, knew and valued a good Musaulman; and without anything but the power of sympathy, put heart into the whole community, and bid them look up. The Hindoos from the first were imbued with the sense that they should receive equal justice at his hands, socially and politically. He devised measures for bringing about a social fusion of the Europeans and natives, who otherwise are as oil and vinegar."
The second of Lady Hobart's volumes consists of his political essays on such subjects as Parliamentary Reform, blockade, the Bank Charter Act of 1844, bribery at elections, and the mission of Cobden, and of letters and minutes on Indian subjects, of which last it is only necessary to say that they seem to indicate that had Lord Hobart lived he would have developed into an Indian statesman of the type of Mounstuart Elphinstone. The poli- tical essays must, in fairness to their author, be read from the standpoint of the periods at which they were written, not to speak of the keen controversies to which they were contribu- tions. Though not as a rule brilliant, and sometimes a little diffuse, they are uniformly flowing and judicious, and give the notion of being the products of a mind at once full and scrupu- lously fair. In her first volume Lady Hobart reproduces, chiefly from Fraser's Magazine, certain of Lord Hobart's lighter essays, on his travels in Scotland, Italy, and elsewhere, "Modern English Literature," a " Chapter on the Sea," and "Points of View."
In the more expressly " graphic " papers, there is little more than enthusiasm pleasantly expressed, and there is not much of the nature of originality in Lord Hobart's views of English litera- ture. In " Points of View " there occurs this passage, which is exceptionally pointed, and besides helps us to understand the author :—
" If you will consider rightly, you will find that all the great im- moralities and vices—avarice, ambition, licentiousness, envy, malice, hatred, and the rest—are the result of the particular view which their victims take of life and all that appertains to it; and that if you wish to change a man's character, you mast change his point of view. This, it will perhaps be said, is confounding moral with in- tellectual truth. No; for the difficulty which there will be in inducing a man to change his point of view is in proportion to the degree of moral degradation into which he has fallen. The Greek word for repentance is paTavota, which expresses an intellectual process,—a change in a man's anderstandieg rather than in his heart ; but it is upon the state of his heart, nevertheless, that his capacity for ILETC1YOflY depends."
Lord Hobart was an agreeable letter-writer, and must have had a good, though not perhaps keen, insight into character. Thus :— " The man who can't admire Scott [by the way, Hobart says also, ' How can any one dislike Scott and live r] can't admire Homer; and I could well fancy Disraeli would do neither. He is a man of great but sophisticated genius I am afraid he is a charlatan in every sense of the word. He has, however, one quality which I rather admire (perhaps because I have it not myself),—faith in the pleasure and profit of distinction, and power and courage to work for it."
Hobart's views upon lady novelists are rather peculiar. In his essay on " Modern English Literature " he says " Miss Austen writes in plain, quiet, harmonious English the dullest stories that ever were conceived," and " Wuthering Heights, considering its authorship, I look upon as the greatest intellectual prodigy that the world has seen." Of George Eliot he says in his Letters, "I have been reading Felix Holt, and do not think it good.
I am certain that lady is greatly overrated. I do not at all believe Palgrave wrote Ecce Homo. I should fancy Miss Evans might have written it, but the style is too good for her." Probably there could not be produced a more delicious example of hope- lessly incorrect criticism than this last sentence.
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