this place. That will not be my reason for wishing to avoid it; but the
change of conversation; the fear of becoming a mere ruffian; and of
imbibing the tyrannical principles of an absolute commander, or, giving
way insensibly to the temptations of power, till I become proud,
insolent and intolerable;--these considerations will make me wish to
leave the regiment before the next winter, and always if it could be so
after eight months duty; that by frequenting men above myself I may know
my true condition, and by discoursing with the other sex may learn some
civility and mildness of carriage, but never pay the price of the last
improvement with the loss of reason. Better be a savage of some use than
a gentle, amorous puppy, obnoxious to all the world. One of the wildest
of wild clans is a worthier being than a perfect Philander."
Wolfe, it must be owned, does not write well. He has reason to envy, as
he does, the grace of the female style. He is not only ungrammatical,
which, in a familiar letter, is a matter of very small consequence, but
somewhat stilted. Perhaps it was like the "Madam," the fashion of the
Johnsonian era. Yet beneath the buckram you always feel that there is a
heart. Persons even of the same profession are cast in very different
moulds; and the mould of Wolfe was as different as possible from that of
the Iron Duke.
Wolfe's dreary garrison leisures in Scotland, however, were not idle.
His books go with him, and he is doing his best to cultivate himself,
both professionally and generally. He afterwards recommends to a friend,
evidently from his own experience, a long list of military histories and
other works ancient and modern. The ancients he read in translations.
His range is wide and he appreciates military genius in all its forms.
"There is an abundance of military knowledge to be picked out of the
lives of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII., King of Sweden, and of
Zisca the Bohemian, and if a tolerable account could be got of the
exploits of Scanderbeg, it would be inestimable, for he excels all the
officers ancient and modern in the conduct of a small defensive army."
At Louisburg, Wolfe put in practice, with good effect, a manoeuvre which
he had learned from the Carduchi in Xenophon, showing perhaps by this
reproduction of the tactics employed two thousand years before by a
barbarous tribe, that in the so-called art of war there is a large
element which is not progressive. Books will never make a soldier, but
Wolfe, as a military student, had the advantage of actual experience of
war. Whenever he could find a teacher, he studied mathematics, zealously
though apparently not with delight. "I have read the mathematics till I
am grown perfectly stupid, and have algebraically worked away the little
portion of understanding that was allowed to me. They have not even left
me the qualities of a coxcomb for I can neither laugh nor sing nor talk
an hour upon nothing. The latter of these is a sensible loss, for it
excludes a gentleman from all good company and makes him entirely unfit
for the conversation of the polite world." "I don't know how the
mathematics may assist the judgment, but they have a great tendency to
make men dull. I who am far from being sprightly even in my gaiety, am
the very reverse of it at this time." Certainly to produce sprightliness
is neither the aim nor the general effect of mathematics. That while
military education was carried on, general culture was not wholly
neglected, is proved by the famous exclamation about Gray's Elegy, the
most signal homage perhaps that a poet ever received. At Glasgow, where
there is a University, Wolfe studies mathematics in the morning, in the
afternoon he endeavours to regain his lost Latin.
Nor in training himself did he neglect to train his soldiers. He had
marked with bitterness of heart the murderous consequence to which
neglect of training had led in the beginning of every war. Probably he
had the army of Frederick before his eyes. His words on musketry
practice may still have an interest. "Marksmen are nowhere so necessary
as in a mountainous country; besides, firing at objects teaches the
soldiers to level incomparably, makes the recruit steady, and removes
the foolish apprehension that seizes young soldiers when they first load
their arms with bullets. We fire, first singly, then by files, one, two,
three, or more, then by ranks, and lastly by platoons; and the soldiers
see the effects of their shots, especially at a mark or upon water. We
shoot obliquely and in different situations of ground, from heights
downwards and contrariwise."
Military education and attention to the details of the profession were
not very common under the Duke of Wellington. They were still less
common under the Duke of Cumberland. Before he was thirty, Wolfe was a
great military authority, and what was required of Chatham, in his case,
was not so much the eye to discern latent merit, as the boldness to
promote merit over the head of rank.
In a passage just quoted Wolfe expresses his fear lest command should
make him tyrannical. He was early tried by the temptation of power. He
became Lieut.-Colonel at twenty-five; but in the absence of his Colonel
he had already been in command at Stirling when he was only twenty-
three. This was in quarters where he was practically despotic. He does
not fail in his letters to pour out his heart on his situation.
"Tomorrow Lord George Sackville goes away, and I take upon me the
difficult and troublesome employment of a commander. You can't conceive
how difficult a thing it is to keep the passions within bounds, when
authority and immaturity go together: to endeavour at a character which
has every opposition from within, and that the very condition of the
blood is a sufficient obstacle to. Fancy you see me that must do justice
to good and bad; reward and punish with an equal unbiassed hand; one
that is to reconcile the severity of discipline with the dictates of
humanity, one that must study the tempers and dispositions of many men,
in order to make their situation easy and agreeable to them, and should
endeavour to oblige all without partiality; a mark set up for everybody
to observe and judge of; and last of all, suppose one employed in
discouraging vice, and recommending the reverse, at the turbulent age of
twenty-three, when it is possible I may have as great a propensity that
way as any of the men that I converse with." He had difficulties of
character to contend with, as well as difficulties of age. His temper
was quick; he knew it. "My temper is much too warm, and sudden
resentment forces out expressions and even actions that are neither
justifiable nor excusable, and perhaps I do not conceal the natural heat
so much as I ought to do." He even felt that he was apt to misconstrue
the intentions of those around him, and to cherish groundless
prejudices. "I have that wicked disposition of mind that whenever I know
that people have entertained a very ill opinion, I imagine they never
change. From whence one passes easily to an indifference about them, and
then to dislike, and though I flatter myself that I have the seeds of
justice strong enough to keep from doing wrong, even to an enemy, yet
there lurks a hidden poison in the heart that it is difficult to root
out. It is my misfortune to catch fire on a sudden, to answer letters
the moment I receive them, when they touch me sensibly, and to suffer
passion to dictate my expressions more than my reason. The next day,
perhaps, would have changed this, and earned more moderation with it.
Every ill turn of my life has had this haste and first impulse of the
moment for its cause, and it proceeds from pride." Solitary command and
absence from the tempering influences of general society were, as he
keenly felt, likely to aggravate his infirmities. Yet he proves not only
a successful but a popular commander, and he seems never to have lost
his friends. The "seeds of justice" no doubt were really strong, and the
transparent frankness of his character, its freedom from anything like
insidiousness or malignity, must have had a powerful effect in
dispelling resentment.
His first regimental minute, of which his biographer gives us an
abstract, evinces a care for his men which must have been almost
startling in the days of "Hangman Hawley." He desires to be acquainted
in writing with the men and the companies they belong to, and as soon as
possible with their characters, that he may know the proper objects to
encourage, and those over whom it will be necessary to keep a strict
hand. The officers are enjoined to visit the soldiers' quarters
frequently; now and then to go round between nine and eleven o'clock at
night, and not trust to sergeants' reports. They are also requested to
watch the looks of the privates, and observe whether any of them were
paler than usual, that the reason might be inquired into and proper
means used to restore them to their former vigour. Subalterns are told
that "a young officer should not think he does too much." But firmness,
and great firmness, must have been required, as well as watchfulness and
kindness. His confidential expressions with regard to the state of the
army are as strong as words can make them. "I have a very mean opinion
of the Infantry in general. I know their discipline to be bad and their
valour precarious. They are easily put into disorder and hard to recover
out of it. They frequently kill their officers in their fear and murder
one another in their confusion." "Nothing, I think, can hurt their
discipline--it is at its worst. They shall drink and swear, plunder and
murder, with any troops in Europe, the Cossacks and Calmucks themselves
not excepted." "If I stay much longer with the regiment I shall be
perfectly corrupt; the officers are loose and profligate and the
soldiers are very devils." He brought the 67th, however, into such a
condition that it remained a model regiment for years after he was gone.
Nor were the duties of a commanding officer in Scotland at that period
merely military. In the Highlands especially, he was employed in
quenching the smoking embers of rebellion, and in re-organizing the
country after the anarchy of civil war. Disarming had to be done, and
suppression of the Highland costume, which now marks the Queen's
favourite regiment, but then marked a rebel. This is bad, as well as
unworthy, work for soldiers, who have not the trained self-command which
belongs to a good police, and for which the Irish Constabulary are as
remarkable as they are for courage and vigour. Even Wolfe's sentiments
contracted a tinge of cruelty from his occupation. In one of his
subsequent letters he avows a design which would have led to the
massacre of a whole clan. "Would you believe that I am so bloody?" We do
not believe that he was so bloody, and are confident that the design, if
it was ever really formed, would not have been carried into effect. But
the passage is the most painful one in his letters. The net result of
his military administration, however, was that the people at Inverness
were willing to celebrate the Duke of Cumberland's birthday, though they
were not willing to comply with the insolent demand of Colonel Lord
Bury, who had come down to take the command for a short time, that they
should celebrate it on the anniversary of Culloden. It is a highly
probable tradition that the formation of Highland regiments was
suggested by Wolfe.
In a passage which we have quoted Wolfe glances at the awkward and
perilous position in which a young commander was placed in having to
control the moral habits of officers his equals in age, and to rebuke
the passions which mutinied in his own blood. He could hardly be
expected to keep himself immaculate. But he is always struggling to do
right and repentant when he does wrong. "We use a very dangerous freedom
and looseness of speech among ourselves; this by degrees makes
wickedness and debauchery less odious than it should be, if not
familiar, and sets truth, religion, and virtue at a great distance. I
hear things every day said that would shock your ears, and often say
things myself that are not fit to be repeated, perhaps without any ill
intention, but merely by the force of custom. The best that can be
offered in our defence is that some of us see the evil and wish to avoid
it." Among the very early letters there is one to his brother about
"pretty mantua makers," etc, but it is evidently nothing but a nominal
deference to the military immorality of the age. Once when on a short
visit to London, and away from the restraining responsibilities of his
command, Wolfe, according to his own account, lapsed into debauchery.
"In that short time I committed more imprudent acts than in all my life
before I lived in the idlest, [most] dissolute, abandoned manner that
could be conceived, and that not out of vice, which is the most
extraordinary part of it. I have escaped at length and am once more
master of my reason, and hereafter it shall rule my conduct; at least I
hope so." Perhaps the lapse may have been worse by contrast than in
itself. The intensity of pure affection which pervades all Wolfe's
letters is sufficient proof that he had never abandoned himself to
sensuality to an extent sufficient to corrupt his heart. The age was
profoundly sceptical, and if the scepticism had not spread to the army
the scoffing had. Wolfe more than once talks lightly of going to church
as a polite form; but he appears always to have a practical belief in
God.
It is worthy of remark that a plunge into London dissipation follows
very close upon the disappointment of an honourable passion. Wolfe had a
certain turn of mind which favoured matrimony "prodigiously," and he had
fallen very much in love with Miss Lawson, Maid of Honour to the
Princess of Wales. But the old General and Mrs. Wolfe opposed the match
--apparently on pecuniary grounds. "They have their eye upon one of
L30,000." Miss Lawson had only L12,000. Parents had more authority then
than they have now, Wolfe was exceedingly dutiful, and he allowed the
old people, on whom, from the insufficiency of his pay, he was still
partly dependent, to break off the affair. Such at least seems to have
been the history of its termination. The way in which Wolfe records the
catastrophe, it must be owned, is not very romantic. "This last
disappointment in love has changed my natural disposition to such a
degree that I believe it is now possible that I might prevail upon
myself not to refuse twenty or thirty thousand pounds, if properly
offered. Rage and despair do not commonly produce such reasonable
effects; nor are they the instruments to make a man's fortune by but in
particular cases." It was long, however, before he could think of Miss
Lawson without a pang, and the sight of her portrait, he tells us, takes
away his appetite for some days.
At seven and twenty Wolfe left Scotland, having already to seven years'
experience of warfare added five years' experience of difficult command.
He is now able to move about a little and open his mind, which has been
long cramped by confinement in Highland quarters. He visits an old uncle
in Ireland, and, as one of the victors of Culloden, views with special
interest that field of the Boyne, where in the last generation Liberty
and Progress had triumphed over the House of Stuart. "I had more
satisfaction in looking at this spot than in all the variety that I have
met with; and perhaps there is not another piece of ground in the world
that I could take so much pleasure to observe." Then, though with
difficulty, he obtained the leave of the pipe-clay Duke to go to Paris.
There he saw the hollow grandeur of the decaying monarchy and the
immoral glories of Pompadour. "I was yesterday at Versailles, a cold
spectator of what we commonly call splendour and magnificence. A
multitude of men and women were assembled to bow and pay their
compliments in the most submissive manner to a creature of their own
species." He went into the great world, to which he gains admission with
an ease which shows that he has a good position, and tries to make up
his leeway in the graces by learning to fence, dance, and ride. He
wishes to extend his tour and see the European armies; but the Duke
inexorably calls him back to pipe-clay. It is proposed to him that he
should undertake the tutorship of the young Duke of Richmond on a
military tour through the Low Countries. But he declines the offer. "I
don't think myself quite equal to the task, and as for the pension that
might follow, it is very certain that it would not become me to accept
it. I can't take money from any one but the King, my master, or from
some of his blood."
Back, therefore, to England and two years more of garrison duty there.
Quartered in the high-perched keep of Dover where "the winds rattle
pretty loud" and cut off from the world without, as he says, by the
absence of newspapers or coffee houses, he employs the tedious hours in
reading while his officers waste them in piquet. The ladies in the town
below complain through Miss Brett to Mrs. Wolfe of the unsociality of
the garrison. "Tell Nannie Brett's ladies," Wolfe replies, "that if they
lived as loftily and as much in the clouds as we do, their appetites for
dancing or anything else would not be so keen. If we dress, the wind
disorders our curls; if we walk, we are in danger of our legs; if we
ride, of our necks." Afterwards, however, he takes to dancing to please
the ladies and apparently grows fond of it.
Among the High Tories of Devonshire he has to do a little more of the
work of pacification in which he had been employed in the Highlands. "We
are upon such terms with the people in general that I have been forced
to put on all my address, and employ my best skill to conciliate
matters. It begins to work a little favourably, but not certainly,
because the perverseness of these folks, built upon their disaffection,
makes the task very difficult. We had a little ball last night, to
celebrate His Majesty's birthday--purely military; that is the men were
all officers except one. The female branches of the Tory families came
readily enough, but not one man would accept the invitation because it
was the King's birthday. If it had not fallen in my way to see such an
instance of folly I should not readily be brought to conceive it." He
has once more to sully a soldier's sword by undertaking police duty
against the poor Gloucestershire weavers, who are on strike, and, as he
judges, not without good cause. "This expedition carries me a little out
of my road and a little in the dirt.... I hope it will turn out a good
recruiting party, for the people are so oppressed, so poor and so
wretched, that they will perhaps hazard a knock on the pate for bread
and clothes and turn soldiers through sheer necessity."
Chatham and glory are now at hand; and the hero is ready for the hour--
_Sed mors atra caput nigra, circumvolat umbra_. "Folks are
surprised to see the meagre, decaying, consumptive figure of the son,
when the father and mother preserve such good looks; and people are not
easily persuaded that I am one of the family. The campaigns of 1743, '4,
'5, '6, and '7 stripped me of my bloom, and the winters in Scotland and
at Dover have brought me almost to old age and infirmity, and this
without any remarkable intemperance. A few years more or less are of
very little consequence to the common run of men, and therefore I need
not lament that I am perhaps somewhat nearer my end than others of my
time. I think and write upon these points without being at all moved. It
is not the vapours, but a desire I have to be familiar with those ideas
which frighten and terrify the half of mankind that makes me speak upon
the subject of my dissolution."
The biographer aptly compares Wolfe to Nelson. Both were frail in body,
aspiring in soul, sensitive, liable to fits of despondency, sustained
against all weaknesses by an ardent zeal for the public service, and
gifted with the same quick eye and the same intuitive powers of command.
But it is also a just remark that there was more in Nelson of the love
of glory, more in Wolfe of the love of duty. "It is no time to think of
what is convenient or agreeable; that service is certainly the best in
which we are the most useful. For my part I am determined never to give
myself a moment's concern about the nature of the duty which His Majesty
is pleased to order us upon; and whether it is by sea or by land that we
are to act in obedience to his commands, I hope that we shall conduct
ourselves so as to deserve his approbation. It will be sufficient
comfort to you, too, as far as my person is concerned, at least it will
be a reasonable consolation, to reflect that the Power which has
hitherto preserved me may, if it be his pleasure, continue to do so; if
not, that it is but a few days or a few years more or less, and that
those who perish in their duty and in the service of their country die
honourably. I hope I shall have resolution and firmness enough to meet
every appearance of danger without great concern, and not be over
solicitous about the event." "I have this day signified to Mr. Pitt that
he may dispose of my slight carcass as he pleases, and that I am ready
for any undertaking within the reach and compass of my skill and
cunning. I am in a very bad condition both with the gravel and
rheumatism; but I had much rather die than decline any kind of service
that offers itself: if I followed my own taste it would lead me into
Germany, and if my poor talent was consulted they should place me in the
cavalry, because nature has given me good eyes and a warmth of temper to
follow the first impressions. However, it is not our part to choose but
to obey."
All know that the way in which Mr. Pitt pleased to dispose of the
"slight carcass" was by sending it to Rochefort, Louisburg, Quebec.
Montcalm, when he found himself dying, shut himself up with his
Confessor and the Bishop of Quebec, and to those who came to him for
orders said "I have business that must be attended to of greater moment
than your ruined garrison and this wretched country." Wolfe's last words
were, "Tell Colonel Baxter to march Webb's regiment down to Charles
River, to cut off their retreat from the Bridge. Now, God be praised, I
will die in peace."
FALKLAND AND THE PURITANS
[Footnote: Published in the _Contemporary Review_ as a reply to Mr.
Matthew Arnold's Essay on Falkland.]
We have the most unfeigned respect for the memory of Falkland. Carlyle's
sneer at him has always seemed to us about the most painful thing in the
writings of Carlyle. Our knowledge of his public life is meagre, and is
derived mainly from a writer under whose personal influence he acted,
who is specially responsible for the most questionable step that he
took, and on whose veracity, with regard to this portion of the history
not much reliance can be placed. But we cannot doubt his title to our
admiration and our love. Of his character as a friend, as a host, and as
the centre of a literary circle, we have a picture almost peerless in
social history. He seems to have presented in a very attractive form the
combination--rare now, though not rare in that age, especially among the
great Puritan chiefs--of practical activity and military valour with
high culture and a serious interest in great questions. Of his fine
feelings as a man of honour we have more than one proof. We have proof
equally strong of his self-sacrificing devotion to his country; though
in this he stood not alone: with his blood on the field of Newbury
mingled that of many an English yeoman, whose cheeks were as wet when he
left his Puritan home to die for the religion and liberties of England
as were those of Lord Falkland when he left the "lime-trees and violets"
of Great Tew.