Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2)

Alas, when the news of the triumph was telegraphed by Dr Hunter, it was too late to tell the dying man. Day by day he had grown weaker, albeit cheerful and even sanguine when he drowsily talked of himself; and now he had sunk so low that his daughter dared not rouse him with so exciting a message. He never fully regained consciousness; and those about him learned how bitter a thing it could be

"To hear the world applaud the hollow ghostWhich blamed the living man."

The end came on the morning of 30th January 1891. He was fifty-seven years and four months old.

As in his previous illness, prayers had been offered up for him in many churches; and many were the tributes of those who had been opposed to him in religion and in politics; still more, of course, of those more in agreement with him. But his daughter had been driven to take the precaution of procuring signed testimony, from those who had been attending him, that during his illness he was never heard to utter one word "either directly or indirectly bearing upon religion or any religious subject." The eternal pretence of a "recantation" was already current afresh, as it had been after he resigned his presidentship of the National Secular Society, even while he was writing his arguments against Mr Gladstone's book, and re-stating his Atheism as explicitly as ever in his "Doubts in Dialogue." One of the last non-political lectures he had given, in November, had been a manifesto on "My Heresy now and Thirty-six Years ago;" and in December he had discoursed on "Life, Death, and Immortality" with no faltering in his doctrine.

The funeral was on 3rd February, at Brookwood Cemetery. He had never troubled himself as to how his body should be dealt with, so his daughter chose that it should be in the "earth to earth" fashion. At his express wish, written in a will dated some years before, the burial was perfectly silent – an arrangement which caused some regret among friends, and some characteristic phrases about "being buried like a dog" from others, who could not feel the pathos and solemnity of the silent sepulture, amid the uncovered multitude who had come to pay their last tribute at the grave of the man they had honoured and loved. As he had always disliked the shows of mourning and the badges of grief, those who knew his tastes wore none. But the grief of the thousands who filled the trains from London to the burial-place was such as needed no other attestation. They were of both sexes and all classes, from costermongers to right honourables; they came from all parts of England; and soldiers' red coats and the bronzed faces of hundreds of Hindus gave a wide significance of aspect to the throng. Hundreds, many of them from Northampton, had brought the little tri-coloured rosettes they used to wear in the old fighting days; and many threw these in the grave, some saying as they did so that their work too was done, now that he was gone.

Over an hour after the coffin had been laid in the earth, when it was thought that the multitude had passed away, the immediate friends and mourners of the dead went back to take a last look, and they found that a lingering band of devoted men had got the shovels from the workmen, and were one by one obtaining the last sad privilege of casting their handful of earth into the grave.

CONCLUSION

If the foregoing volumes have not shown what manner of man Bradlaugh was, as well as what he did, they have been written in vain. But it may be fitting to attempt, in a closing page or two, some general estimate of his personality. The present writer is, indeed, conscious of unfitness for the task, were it only because of a personal affection which must somewhat bias criticism. But when a man has had so much evil said of him as Bradlaugh had throughout his life, the inclining of the balance a little way towards love and admiration may be forgiven. Indeed, most men would find it hard to write of him with perfect impartiality. He inspired, as a rule, either aversion or admiration, and the furious enmities of which these pages bear record were in a way the correlative of the intense devotion given to him by thousands.

Such a description would in some cases suggest an intensely passionate and ill-balanced nature, at once winning and grievously faulty; hardly a man of keenly analytic intellect, remarkable self-control, and extreme sagacity. Yet these latter qualities he certainly had. He was in truth a singular combination of chivalrous heroism and practical wisdom – a combination such as I cannot find a parallel for in memory. He had the quixotic ardour of a young enthusiast, an ardour which never left him to the end; and he combined it with a political foresight and judgment such as few modern English statesmen have exhibited. It was the ardour for justice and truth, the forthright sincerity and disregard of convenient conformities, that won him the love and allegiance of men who possessed and valued courage; and it was his keen sagacity that kept their adherence. In modern England he stands out singularly as a powerful and prominent man who chose to set his face openly and systematically against what he held to be shams and delusions, though the impeaching of them brought him the bitterest hostility, the foulest calumny, and a perpetual struggle, where a mere tacit conformity would have meant manifold success, wealth, and ease. There is no country in which straightforwardness and single-mindedness are more belauded than in England, and perhaps none in which they are scarcer. The praise of them forms part of the "cant that does not know it is cant," which Carlyle denounced, and exemplified. Men declare their esteem for courage and sincerity; and when they meet a shining example of these virtues they cast their mud with the unthinking vulgar. No amount of reiteration of phrases about prophets who have been stoned by the Scribes and Pharisees can withhold the average moralist from joining the Scribes and Pharisees when the next prophet shows face. To panegyrise old prophets in platitudes is such a very different thing from recognising a new one in the market-place and taking him by the hand.

Of course, while men do unquestionably dislike an innovator and fighter for being more honest and plain-spoken than themselves, they do not openly put their enmity on those grounds. They must find sins and faults for him: what faults he has they will magnify and multiply. And as, of course, all of us who practise any self-criticism at all can realise that the hostilities we set up, however unjust we hold them to be, have a certain basis in our shortcomings, it is only reasonable to look for part of the pretext of Bradlaugh's enemies in his. What then were his faults? We have seen and heard enough of those falsely imputed: what was his real share of human infirmity? I have heard him accused, by people who were not rabidly hostile, of egoism, vanity, love of flattery, and a tendency to be overbearing. For perhaps all of these charges he would himself have more readily admitted a foundation than would his sympathetic friends. He used to make humorous allusion, in his speeches at Freethought gatherings, to his despotism in the chair. He ruled conferences with a rod, not of iron but of ivory – the rod of absolute technical law. He was the most swift and unyielding of chairmen; and men unwittingly out of order called him not only hard but unjust. But some who had resented his way in these matters have been known spontaneously to wish for his ruling hand when it was still. In all matters where authority and command belonged to the situation, and he was in authority, he ruled with a military firmness and quickness; and as no man can miss making mistakes, he must have made some, though they would be hard to prove. Nay, he himself avowed a certain stress of nervous energy which, on bustling occasions, made him abrupt and impatient of meddling and dilatoriness. This overplus of energy came out quaintly in his inveterate habit of being much too early for a train. He had, in fact, the relative defect of the Napoleonic quality of swift decision and intense determination. Thus, as one Freethinker once told him, his manner was not always "economical;" and the hostilities he aroused were apt to be as intense as the admirations, and to be hindrances to his career. Most of his enemies were themselves certainly faulty men, and not a few were very bad men indeed; but he would not have denied that he might at times have made an honest man his unfriend. Such an abnormal will-power as his193 cannot miss making some of the manifestations of excess of driving power in the human machine. But nothing could be more mistaken, or more unjust, than to make out that this stress of will-power made him an unjust or an inconsiderate man. On the contrary, tried by the decisive tests of his family life and his relation to his colleagues, he was the fairest and most tolerant of men. Of his family virtues his daughter has told: of his considerateness as an editor all who worked with him can speak. I never knew or heard of one who even came near him in his regard for the independence of his contributors, and in his concern to give the fullest hearing to opponents. In all the essentials of just-mindedness he was singularly well endowed; it was only in respect of physiological over-emphasis that he could ever be impeached. And even on that score, as has been above abundantly shown, it is utterly false that he was ever brutal in speech, or arrogant or discourteous in intercourse or controversy. He was even criticised at times for a certain old-world courtliness, more continental than English, and this long before he had won general recognition. A thousand printed reports and testimonies go to dispose of vague and unsupported aspersions. I am told that in the last year or two of his life, when his nervous and vascular system was breaking up, he was at times sharply impatient of incompetent opposition on the secular platform, but that is a small matter against the self-control of a lifetime. Tried by, or in comparison with, his peers, he needs no vindication.

On the points of "egoism" and "vanity" I have heard him forestall criticism. He confessed that he sought power, and shaped his life to attain his ambitions – these being what they were. He had simply the egoism of an extremely powerful man with an end in view. But it was never the egoism of a Napoleon, stooping to meanness as readily as it hazarded battles. He was an honourable gentleman to the end. Those who deprecated his legal way of fighting legal battles simply failed to appreciate the lawyer's method. That he was a born as well as a trained lawyer many lawyers have admitted; and he fought technically, and thwarted his enemies by technicalities, because law was to him a technique. Nobody but a man with a genuine belief in it as a technical system would have gone to law as often as he did, even to resist gross injustice. On the point of "vanity," again, he frankly anticipated criticism. "Oh, don't say that: I am very vain," I once heard him say to Madame Venturi when she was protesting that a certain statesman's vanity was insufferable. Of course such a confession could not come from a really vain man. He once spoke of "the Irish part of my character" as something that his friends must allow for. A man who can thus detect foibles in himself is not badly swayed by them. As for the charge that he was susceptible to flattery – a variant on the trite and stupid charge of "love of notoriety" – it came latterly, I think, only from Liberals in the House who grudged his popularity among the Tories, they themselves seeing in him a stumblingblock to that species of success which both parties are so apt to set above pursuit of principle. The later Tories, having nothing to suffer in the esteem of the pious from friendship with him, showed him some consideration; while the official Liberals uneasily anticipated the demand from their supporters outside that Bradlaugh should be in the next Liberal Cabinet. It is painful to have to say that to such Liberals his death was a relief. And it is intelligible that they should prefer to see in his geniality and courtesy a fishing for Tory flattery rather than a manly merit. If after years of desperate strife, conscious of failing health, the aging fighter had been sedulous to win goodwill, it would have been small harm; but he was genial out of the very warmth of heart that had made him a fighter. Of his unwavering fidelity to the Radical principles of his life it would be vain to say anything here if the preceding pages have not made it clear. The respect which he won from political opponents in the House was no result of compromise on his part, or of his resistance to certain Socialist doctrines. He was in sharp collision with them on other issues to the last. A good testimony to the genuineness of their respect is that which comes from the late Mr W. H. Smith, in his biography by Sir Herbert Maxwell. It is there told that once in 1886 Mr Smith's private secretary, travelling in the same railway carriage with Bradlaugh, happened to mention the station at which he was going to stop. "Ah, you are going to stay with Mr Smith," said Bradlaugh. "Well, I don't suppose there is a man in the House of Commons or in England with whom I am more widely at variance on many subjects, yet there is none for whom I have more sincere respect." In the evening the secretary told his host that he had travelled down with Bradlaugh. "Indeed," said Smith. "Well, it's a strange thing; I don't believe there is a man whose opinions I hold in greater abhorrence than Bradlaugh's; but I cannot help feeling that there is not an honester man in Parliament." And I have myself heard Bradlaugh speak in private of the genuineness and simplicity of Smith's character – in respect of such a matter as private donations to churches – even at a time when he had penned humorous paragraphs on Smith's head-butler manner of leading the legislature. Both men were honest, and that was a ground of sympathy. And though the professor of the "religion of love" had to express "abhorrence" of the opinions he rejected, he called to make friendly inquiry when Bradlaugh lay on his deathbed – an attention paid by none of the Liberal leaders.

But this honesty, which won him the regard of antagonists when they came close enough to see it, was simply the manifestation in political life of the fundamental and propulsive love of truth and reason which made him an Atheist propagandist. He happened to care for truth and justice all round, where other men were satisfied with a measure of homage to one or two principles they cared to recognise, or prejudices they cared to gratify. He had leapt forward, from his youth up, at the sound of the trumpet in every good cause, where they had mostly been careful to count the cost.

"No fetter but galled his wrist;No wrong that was not his own."

And to his last days, he never learned the sordid lessons of prudent conformity even where they might have meant a serious lightening of his burdens. Once in the last year of his life, I commented jestingly, as laying down the code of commercial journalism, or his devotion of columns of his journal to dry details of the Indian grievances he took up, when he might have raised the circulation by lampooning his fellow-members. He felt so strongly on the subject of English disregard of Indian claims that even the jest disturbed him, and he met it with an Et tu, Brute. No man was saner in the adjustment of a necessary compromise in legislation; but no man was ever more innocent of the spirit of Nothingarianism. "Good God, Bradlaugh," said a friendly Conservative member to him one day, reproaching him for his quixotry, "what does it matter whether there is a God or not?" The amiable indifferentists who subscribe to that philosophy, though they may have been able to appreciate him as a companion, will never be able to understand the enthusiasm which Bradlaugh aroused in thousands of those who followed him, and even in some whose way of thought diverged far from his. I have heard of one eminent professional man who long wore Bradlaugh's portrait next his breast, and long hesitated between following him and turning Catholic. Men who never had any leanings that way could the more heartily give their devotion. Certain it is that Bradlaugh evoked a passion of love and loyalty from thousands, such as no other public man of his day called forth. His followers followed him as Nelson's men did Nelson. Mr Gladstone has the enthusiastic reverence of myriads; but men who would go through fire and water for their leader, and give up their tobacco to send him a weekly sixpence, were to be looked for rather in Bradlaugh's following than his.

Men turned instinctively to Bradlaugh as to a born leader. Had any great social convulsion arisen in his time, such as some foretell for the near future, he would infallibly have come to the front as none of his political contemporaries were fitted to do – as Cromwell did and as Danton did. In him the faculty of action was not limited to the sphere of the forum and the bureau. It has been told194 how, when in Spain, he offered to the Republican leaders to go with fifty horsemen and shoot the traitorous general in the north; and we may safely hold with the narrator of this episode that "he would have done it" had the offer been accepted. Among the many adventures of his younger days, the details of which will probably never now be put together, was a singular attempt in which he took part to secure the election of a Liberal Pope. He carried letters to and fro in Europe on behalf of Italian and other democrats who had conceived the scheme. All I learned from him was the fact of his positively taking part in the enterprise, which, of course, failed. In these and other journeys he ran many risks; and he told a funny story of how, travelling one night in a German train with a good deal of money in his possession, and being awakened from his sleep, with the train at full speed, by the conductor's lamp presented to his face, after the continental fashion, where on his lying down there had been no one else in the compartment, he in an instant had that startling and startled functionary by the throat in the opposite corner of the carriage. His army training and his later experiences had developed in him a remarkable turn for dealing promptly with physical emergencies; and persons who sought, in the old days, to block the "Reform" processions for the leading of which he was responsible, came to swift and serious confusion. To the last he had in him something of Cromwell's Berserker temper, though at his blood's hottest he could never have been guilty of the Puritan's ferocity. It came out in him in such acts as his personal seizure and expulsion of rowdies from his meetings. I saw him effect this dramatically enough at one of the great St James's Hall meetings he organised about 1886. Tories had come with forged tickets, but were detected and ejected; and these, or others, determined to give due trouble, took the course of keeping up a loud and distracting tapping on the glass door at the off end of one of the balconies. The disturbers being in great force outside, the doorkeepers were helpless; the loud click-click was disconcerting the speaker then on his feet; and the audience were growing more and more irritated and restless. Bradlaugh left the chair, passed down and then up to the balcony, made his way along to the door, opened it sharply and disappeared, but in a moment re-entered, holding a man by the collar. This was the ringleader with the stick. Startled at the apparition of Bradlaugh, he had involuntarily raised that weapon; but in a flash it was out of his hands and broken across Bradlaugh's knee. The pale disturber was then taken by his captor – still by the collar – along the crowded balcony to the platform end, where he was ejected by the other doorway. He did not return: his followers broke up; and the meeting proceeded in peace, after a spontaneous expression of its satisfaction at the manner of the relief. That there was nobody like Bradlaugh for an awkward emergency, was the fresh verdict of his followers.

And these things, and his shaping of his life, were all of a piece with the extraordinary effectiveness of his oratory. In tempestuous power and intensity of feeling it surpassed any that it has ever been my lot to listen to: it roused men to great thrills of sympathy apart from any of that foregone approbation which swells the cheering for so many political leaders. He could make enthusiastic followers at one hearing, and keep them for a generation. Oratory was with him not an art, but an inspiration; he even misused his wonderfully powerful voice; but he sounded easily all the notes of eloquence, giving at times the whole gamut of effect, jest, pathos, gravity, reasoning, epigram, and thunderous vehemence, in a quarter of an hour's speech. The platform was pre-eminently his place; and no one who merely reads his articles written for reading, tersely strong as his style generally is, can know the extent of his power over language. It did not lie in any special sonority of vocabulary or choice of cadence, but in a volcanic sincerity and spontaneous fire of speech which yet never passed beyond the control of logic and judgment – something equally removed from the measured passion and forceful dignity of Bright, and the copious mellifluence of Gladstone. It was the oratory of unswerving conviction, grave or impassioned or satirical in turn, but always felt and never factitious. He spoke as he lived and fought, going straight for his mark, and staking all on the issue.

To those whom his career leaves cold and whom his character cannot attract, it is enough to say that those who applaud the career and honour the character recognise in them, in their special kind, that invincible and unforgettable something which marks men for remembrance long after their immediate influence has passed away – the something which in artists and poets and warriors we call genius. What Mr John Morley has called the dæmonic elements of character, but may perhaps better be called the dynamic elements, were present in Bradlaugh in a degree which gives a personality a lasting interest. Beside the cautious and merely judicious or clever men, he stands out as one of larger mould and greater fibre, a battling and conquering Titan, sure of the sympathetic retrospect of happier days. It is not merely that as a statesman he impressed friends and foes alike with his insight and his sagacity; and that he combined the fire of the orator with the exactitude of the scholar and the rigorous thinking of the born reasoner; but that in him sagacity never ceased to be heroic, and that his commanding powers rested on a character more commanding still. When, in September 1892, twenty months after his death, a gathering was held in his memory on the occasion of the completion of the bust for his grave, the enthusiasm was as strong, the throng as dense, the tributes as warm, the sympathy as keen, as on the day he was struck down. His name is verily not written in water. And the bronze bust on his tomb, recalling as it does the high front and the unflinching eye which his friends loved to associate with him, and seeming as it does to face fate with an immovable strength and firmness, will for many a year say to passers-by what has been sought to be told in these pages – "This was a man."

THE END

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

MR. BRADLAUGH'S BIRTHPLACE

On p. 3 it is stated that Mr. Bradlaugh was born at No. 5, Bacchus Walk, Hoxton, but this appears to be an error, of which I only became aware in 1905. In that year the London County Council had under consideration the question of placing a tablet on the house in which my father was born, and they wrote me for the purpose of obtaining documentary or other evidence as to the identity of the house. As a result of careful inquiries I found that the birthplace of my father was No. 31, and not No. 5, as I had previously believed. As it was possible that the street had been renumbered, the London County Council undertook to try to find out, and Mr. Gomme, Clerk to the Council, subsequently wrote me that although this point could not be determined with exactitude:

"The probabilities are that the street had not been renumbered since the date of Bradlaugh's birth. If such is the case the house in which he was born has disappeared, for about 1883, No. 31 Bacchus Walk was with a block of other houses in the street demolished to provide a site for the present St. John's Road School, Hoxton. On my reporting these facts, the Committee of the Council dealing with the matter regretfully decided that under the circumstances they could take no further action with regard to this house.