HENRY BROUGHAM

Henry Brougham (1779-1868) received the rudiments of his education in the high school of Edinburgh, Scotland. He was distinguished for precocity and for his intuitive per

ception of whatever subjects he undertook. While fond of pleasure and disposed to study by starts, he was a good student and managed to do more outside reading than any of his fellows.

At the age of sixteen he entered the University of Edinburgh, and in a short time had gained high distinction in the sciences, and especially in mathematics. He showed remarkable talent for research, and at the age of seventeen produced an essay which was thought worthy of

a place in the Edinburgh Philosophical Transactions. His talent for mathematical research soon won him election to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

On completing his college course he entered upon the study of law, and in due time began the practice of his profession. It is sufficient to say that both in his native city and in London, whither he moved after a few years, he gained the highest distinction as an advocate.

Students of public speaking will be interested to learn of the kind of training Brougham received in the art in which he so excelled. When less than fifteen years of age he organized a debating society of boys, who afterwards, most of them, gained distinction themselves as speakers. On entering the university he became a member of the Speculative Society, which gave its members opportunity for the public discussion of leading topics of the day. Here, in this theater of debate, he showed the leadership which afterwards served him so well as presiding officer of the House of Lords. This brilliant enthusiast set himself the task of becoming an orator of distinction in the public life of England. Not even Demosthenes more deliberately resolved to acquire a genius for oratory. He committed orations of the great orators, not so much that he might imitate them as that he might assimilate their ideas and methods. He translated classic orations for the purpose of acquiring an extensive vocabulary and expressive diction, but more profitably he began that serious authorship which brought him into immediate prominence. His "Colonial Policy of European Powers" contained an immense amount of information and was distinguished by a "daring spirit of philosophical inquiry." After removing to London he published the "State of the Nation," which created such favorable comment as to open the way for his election to Parliament. He was also one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, and for more than twenty years was an editor and contributor. Here he began to bring forth those keen editorials on measures of reform, which sounded like speeches from the tribune. He spent much time in exposing the "perversions of public charities, exposing the cruelties of the criminal code, or in rousing public attention to evils resulting from irregularities in the administration of municipal law." Perusal of his speeches and editorials shows him to have been able to point

out defects in administration and suggest reforms. His wide range of thought and his facility of pen gave him that foundation of ideas, that fluency of expression, and that spontaneousness so essential to the successful orator.

Physically Brougham was well fitted for the work of the public speaker. He had a powerful constitution, which "stood the wear and tear of ceaseless activity for more than eighty years." He had a massive forehead, high cheeks, a large mouth, a firm-set jaw, and eyes that gleamed from under his beetling brows. As he advanced in years the lines in his face grew hard and deep, which gave him at times a stern and lowering expression. His voice was harsh and unmusical, even hoarse in excitement, but it was remarkably well modulated. Every look, word, and act indicated exuberance of strength and restless energy, and heightened the effect of his manner, which was rushing and resistless. His vehemence and invective often caused him to outrun the compass of his natural voice and break into screams. "For fierce, vengeful, and irresistible assault," says a biographer, "Brougham stands the foremost man in all this world." His object was not so much to please as to hit hard. His tendency to monotony of declamation caused his enemies to call him "The Harangue. His tendency toward the theatrical in oratory is also to be condemned. At the close of the following passionate appeal he suited his action literally to the word and exhibited the bad taste of falling on his knees in the House of Lords:

I solemnly adjure you, I warn you, I implore you, yea, on my bended knees, I supplicate you, reject not this bill." And yet his advice to young speakers was to cultivate the conversational basis. "If you would learn to speak well," he says, "learn to talk well."

Brougham's style was modeled after that of Demosthenes, though he never attained the clearness and simplicity of the

great Athenian. He says that before writing one of his famous perorations he read and repeated Demosthenes' orations for three or four weeks. While his style was affected favorably by translation and classic imitation, he indulged too much in dictionary words, involved sentences, and parentheses. He had little taste for simple Saxon English. He believed that perfection in style consisted in introducing prepared passages now and then. To this end his finest passages were written and rewritten. He says himself: "I composed the peroration of my speech for the queen, in the House of Lords, twenty times over at least." Lord Granville says of him: "When he seemed to pause in search of thoughts or words, we knew that he had a sentence ready, cut and dried.” While felicitous in description, he lacked in imagination. Though rough in style, given to repetition and exaggeration, and at times lame in his reasoning, yet he was powerful and effective because of his terrific earnestness. He swept his audience by his array of facts, his abundant wit, and the force of his personality. It was essentially a spoken style, to be heard rather than read; for by tone and inflection, by light and shade of expression, he was able to impress himself with great force and effect. One writer says of him that he "accumulates image upon image, metaphor upon metaphor, argument upon argument, till the hearer, perplexed by the multiplicity of ideas, almost loses the thread of the reasoning in the labyrinth of his periods." Goodrich, in his "British Eloquence," discusses this point as follows: "His style has a hearty freshness about it, which springs from the robust constitution of his mind and the energy of his feelings. He sometimes disgusts by his use of Latinized English, and seems never to have studied our language in the true sources of its strength-Shakespeare, Milton, and the English Bible. His greatest fault lies in the structure of his sentences. He

rarely puts forward a simple, distinct proposition. New ideas cluster around the original framework of his thoughts, and instead of throwing them into separate sentences he blends them all in one — enlarging, modifying, interlacing them together till the whole becomes perplexed and cumbersome, in the attempt to crowd an entire system of thought into a single statement. Notwithstanding these faults, however, we dwell upon his speeches with breathless interest. They are a continual strain of impassioned argument, intermingled with fearful sarcasm, withering invective, lofty declamation, and the earnest majesty of a mind which has lost every other thought in the magnitude of its theme."

Few statesmen have had such diversity of gifts and such versatility of achievement. In this he much resembles our own Franklin. Both were men of letters, both were men of science, both were publicists and orators. Brougham was a great and growing force in the first half of the nineteenth century, in all that makes for good citizenship. "He forced the fighting," says a historian, "for the abolition of degrading. punishments in the army and navy; he compelled public attention to English slaveholding and English complicity in the slave trade, until the demand for action could not be evaded; he dared the displeasure of the Court and won the lasting enmity of the King by taking the part of the unfortunate Queen Caroline; and at the same time he was experimenting in optics, studying mathematics, and writing scientific papers for the English Royal Society or the French Academy of Sciences." His debates with Canning were the greatest parliamentary contests of that period. One author calls these men the "Cœur de Lion and the Saladin of the Senate, the one armed with a battle-ax, the other with a scimitar; the one athletic and powerful, the other nimble, adroit, and a consummate master of fence."