CHARLES JAMES FOX.
[Sidenote: 1749-1768--A champion of popular rights]
One of the most immediate results of the Wilkes controversy in the
House of Commons was to draw attention to a young man who had entered
Parliament at the General Election of 1768 while he was still
considerably under age. The young member for Midhurst made himself
conspicuous as the most impassioned opponent of Wilkes. A strenuous
supporter of Luttrell outside the walls of Westminster, inside those
walls the boy who represented the fictitious constituency of Midhurst
distinguished himself by the easy insolence with which he assailed
Wilkes and the popular cause which Wilkes represented. He delighted in
informing the delighted majority in the House that he, for his part,
"paid no regard whatever to the voice of the people." When Burke
condescended to notice and to rebuke the impertinence of a youth of
nineteen, he little thought that the lad whom he reproved would come to
be a far more extreme advocate of popular rights than he himself, or
that the chronicle of the century in recording the names of those who
made themselves prominent for the utterance of democratic opinions
should place the name of John Wilkes far below the name of Charles
James Fox.
It would not be easy to imagine a worse training for a youth intended
for the service of his country and destined to contend for the honors
of the State than the life that was lived by Charles James Fox from
early boyhood to early manhood. It was not in the power of his father,
Henry Fox, Lord Holland, to set before his son the example of a parent
whose public life was pure, admirable, and honorable. But in the
domestic circle Lord Holland was {142} a very different man from the
corrupt and juggling politician known to the world. In the domestic
circle his affections and his tendernesses were his most conspicuous
traits, and in the domestic circle he was as unfortunate for his
children through his very virtues as outside it he was unfortunate by
reason of his vices. Fox was a loving husband, but he was an adoring
father, and the extremest zeal and warmth of his adoration was given to
his son Charles James. The child was from the first precocious, alert,
and gifted beyond his years, and the father fostered and flattered the
precocity with a kind of worship that proved, as it was bound to prove,
disastrous. It seems to have been Henry Fox's deliberate belief that
the best way to bring up a spirited, gifted, headstrong child was to
gratify every wish, surrender to every whim, and pander to every
passion that ebullient youth could feel. The anecdotes of the day teem
with tales of the fantastic homage that Fox paid to the desires and
moods of his imperious infant. He made him his companion while he was
still in the nursery; he allowed him to be his master before he had
fairly left it. Never was the creed of Thelema acted upon more
consistently and persistently than by Lord Holland towards Charles
James Fox. It is an astonishing proof of the strength and innate
goodness of the childish nature that it was not ruined outright,
hopelessly and helplessly, by the worst training ever given to a son by
a father. That it did Fox infinite harm cannot be denied and was only
to be expected. That it failed entirely to unbalance his mind and
destroy his character only serves to show the sterling temper of Fox's
metal. His youth was like his childhood, petted, spoiled, wayward,
capricious, and captivating. Every one loved him, his father, his
father's friends, the school companions with whom he wrote Latin verses
in praise of lovely ladies with lovely names. All through his life the
love of men and the love of women was given to him with a generosity
that was only equal to the lovable nature that compelled and commanded
it. His career is one record of unrivalled precocity. As a child he
had been his father's friend rather than his father's plaything; as a
{143} lad he was his father's travelling companion, and learned from
that father the pleasant art of sowing wild oats not with the hand but
with the whole sack. He returned to England a proficient gambler, a
finished rake, the dear friend of famous men, the darling of beautiful
women, to enter, before he was of age, upon that political career in
which it seemed certain that if he would follow in his father's steps
he might hope for more than his father's fortunes. If Charles Fox had
been quite cankered by his father's care, if the essence of his genius
had been corruptible, he might have given the King's friends a leader
as far removed from them as Lucifer from his satellites, and contrived
perhaps--though that indeed would have been difficult--to amass almost
as much money as he was able to spend with comfort. To judge by the
young man's initial enterprise, his Parliamentary career promised to be
as brilliant and as brutal as any king who hated Chatham and hated
Wilkes and hated the American colonies could possibly desire. The
furious intolerance of his maiden speech was happily, however, only
like that false dawn familiar to travellers in the East. The true
sunrise was yet to come. But for six years he was as consistent in his
support of Lord North and the policy that North represented as for the
rest of his career he was consistent in opposition to it.
[Sidenote: 1768--Fox's scholarship]
The life of Fox recalls, in its brilliant activity, in its no less
brilliant scholarship, the dazzling careers of some of those Italian
princes who were equally at home and equally distinguished in the
battlefield and in the library, equally happy in handling their weapons
or in turning the pages of the latest volume from the presses of Aldus
that renewed the youth of some masterpiece of Greece or Rome. Fox's
scholarship would have been remarkable in a man whose days and nights
were devoted to scholarship alone. It was little less than marvellous
in a man who gave a large part of his days to the fiercest political
fights of a fiercely political age and a large part of his nights to
the fascination of the card-table, the disasters of the dice-box, and
the pursuit of the sweet, elusive shadow which is {144} called
pleasure. Fox's love for literature was indeed its own reward. In the
darkest hours of a life that tasted the bitterness of many public and
many private sorrows he could steep his vexed spirit in the sweet
waters watched by the Muses, and arise cleansed, inspirited, and
comforted. Though he saw those public honors that his genius deserved
denied, though he lost those chances of command by which he could best
have served his country, though his own fault wrecked his fortune and
his own follies wasted his substance and delivered the home of his
glorious youth into alien hands, he could turn from troubles that would
have broken the spirit and cracked the heart of a less heroic fighter,
to find solace and consolation in the golden music of the "Odyssey" and
the majestic cadences of Virgil.
Fox loved the classics with the passion of a poet, not with the
patience of a pedant, and found that noble rapture in the human beauty
of Euripides which Parson Adams found in the divine grandeur of
Aeschylus. But if his reading in the literatures of Greece and Rome
was wide and deep, it was not limited to the literatures which the
world calls classic. France, Italy, Spain, offered him their best, and
found him a worthy worshipper, the faithful lover and loyal student of
all that was best in each. He was the comrade of Don Quixote as he was
the comrade of Orlando Furioso and the comrade of Gil Blas. But he was
never one of those who exalt the laurels of other lands to the neglect
of those of their own. He knew English literature and loved English
literature as well as if he had never scanned a Latin line or
conjugated a Greek verb or read a page of Molière, or Calderon, or
Metastasio. He knew Chaucer as well as it was possible for any one
then or for generations later to know Chaucer, and he appreciated him
as few have appreciated him before or since. The poets of his own time
were as dear to him in their degree as the singer of England's morning
song. It is hardly necessary to say that he was as familiar with
Shakespeare as every one should be and as very few are. Only one arc
was wanting to the circle of his splendid {145} culture, only one
string was lacking to the bow of his prodigious reading. There was a
great literature growing up in a neighboring country of which Charles
Fox knew nothing, and of which we cannot doubt that he would have
rejoiced to know much. It is curious that in a country which had been
ruled for three successive reigns by German sovereigns, the German
language was entirely neglected and the glorious dawn of German
literature entirely ignored. While Fox was still a young man, playing
at love, playing at cards, playing at politics, and through all these
diversions adding to that mighty store of learning, and training his
mind in the finest and most intimate judgments upon the Greek and Roman
poets, Germany had been enriched by the masterpiece of the greatest
critic since Aristotle, and was fostering the golden youth of the
greatest poet since Shakespeare. It would have amazed Fox, as it would
have amazed every English scholar then living, if he could have been
told that the spirit of the antique world was to be renewed in a
country which had given them four generations of phlegmatic princes,
and in a language of which few scholars in England knew a single word.
[Sidenote: 1768--Fox's quarrel with Lord North]
Fox's term of adherence to North and to North's policy was not too
happy a time for the nominal superior. A hot-headed young Lord of the
Admiralty resigned his office in a huff, and was not without difficulty
persuaded to return to office as Commissioner of the Treasury. The
breach between Fox and North was bridged over, but the bridge was
frail. The two men eyed each other with disfavor. Fox asserted his
independence by occasionally voting against the minister, by consorting
with Burke. After the death of Lord Holland, North revenged himself by
dismissing Fox from office in a letter famous for its insolent brevity.
For a time Fox still accorded to the ministry an uncertain support, but
he was drifting in thought and speech and action in the inevitable
direction of his genius. The hour came when he took his seat on the
Opposition benches, and asserted himself as a {146} formidable opponent
of the Government. A quarrel across the Atlantic gave him the
opportunity to prove that the principles which men of to-day would call
Liberal principles had gained one of their greatest and one of their
most eloquent champions.
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