Some of the most eloquent orators in the world have been Irishmen,
and among them Henry Grattan was supreme.
The Irish Parliament in the later half of the eighteenth century
frequently sat spell-bound under the magic of his voice.
In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved by his amazing
eloquence a great National Revolution in Ireland. But eighteen years
later all that he had fought for and achieved was lost in the Act of
Union. In these days I suppose few will be found to defend the means
whereby that Act was passed; but the public assertions that the people
of Ireland were in favour of it wrung from Grattan the following cry of
indignation and wrath:--
"To affirm that the judgment of a nation is erroneous may mortify,
but to affirm that her judgment _against_ is _for_; to assert that
she has said _ay_ when she has pronounced _no_; to affect to refer
a great question to the people; finding the sense of the people,
like that of the parliament, against the question, to force the
question; to affirm the sense of the people to be _for_ the
question; to affirm that the question is persisted in, because the
sense of the people is for it; to make the falsification of the
country's sentiments the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of
the Union; to affirm that her parliament, constitution, liberty,
honour, property, are taken away by her own authority,--there is,
in such artifice, an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility,
that can best be answered by sensations of astonishment and
disgust, excited on this occasion by the British minister, whether
he speaks in gross and total ignorance of the truth, or in
shameless and supreme contempt for it.
"The constitution may be _for a time_ so lost; the character of
the country cannot be so lost. The ministers of the Crown will, or
may, perhaps, at length find that it is not so easy to put down
for ever an ancient and respectable nation, by abilities, however
great, and by power and by corruption, however irresistible;
liberty may repair her golden beams, and with redoubled heat
animate the country; the cry of loyalty will not long continue
against the principles of liberty; loyalty is a noble, a
judicious, and a capacious principle; but in these countries
loyalty, distinct from liberty, is corruption, not loyalty.
"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
principles of liberty. Connexion is a wise and a profound policy;
but connexion without an Irish Parliament is connexion without its
own principle, without analogy of condition; without the pride of
honour that should attend it; is innovation, is peril, is
subjugation--not connexion.
"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
principle of liberty.
"Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the
preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire; but,
without union of hearts--with a separate government, and without a
separate parliament, identification is extinction, is dishonour,
is conquest--not identification.
"Yet I do not give up the country--I see her in a swoon, but she
is not dead--though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless,
still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheeks a
glow of beauty--
"Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there."
"While a plank of the vessel sticks together, I will not leave
her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light
bark of his faith, with every new breath of wind--I will remain
anchored here--with fidelity to the fortunes of my country,
faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall."
Of another character, but not less admirable than his eloquence in the
Senate, was Grattan's achievement with the pen. His description of the
great Lord Chatham lives as one of the most noble panegyrics--it not
the most noble--in the world. No writer, before or since, has offered
anyone such splendid homage as this--that he never sunk "to the
vulgar level of the great."
"The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him.
Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had
the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty, and
one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence
that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his
superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious
politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to
the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and
impracticable, his object was England,--his ambition was fame;
without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made
a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he
smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy
of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his schemes
were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe
and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes
were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the
suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and
enlightened by prophecy.
"The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent--those
sensations which soften, and allure, and vulgarise--were unknown
to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached
him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied
by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to
counsel and decide.
"A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so
authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled
at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality.
Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this
statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and
much of the ruin of his victories--but the history of his country,
and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.
"Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence
was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly
expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom--not like
the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of
Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music
of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding
through the painful subtilty of argumentation; nor was he, like
Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion, but rather lightened
upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of his
mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be
followed.
"Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he
was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he
concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon
many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence, but even
then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with
fatal, unapproachable activity.
"Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could
create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of
slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with
unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm
empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound
through its history."
Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years later, in 1844, another great
English writer, Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage upon the
great Lord Chatham in the _Edinburgh Review_:--
"Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot
which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other
end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests
there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and
Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great
citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable
graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and, from above,
his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face
and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl
defiance at her foes.
"The generation which reared that memorial of him has disappeared.
The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments
which his contemporaries passed on his character may be calmly
revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of
vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors,
will yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose
bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless and
none a more splendid name."
It is a great race, Antony, that can produce a man of such a character
as Chatham, and also writers who can dedicate to him such superb
tributes as these.
Macaulay's prose has been much criticised as being too near to easy
journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of English;
but this much must be recognised to his great credit--he never wrote
an obscure sentence or an ambiguous phrase, and his works may be
searched in vain for a foreign idiom or even a foreign word. He
possessed an infallible memory, absolute perspicuity, and a scholarly
taste. He detested oppression wherever enforced, and never exercised
his great powers in the defence of mean politics or unworthy practices.
Such a writer to-day would blow a wholesome wind across the tainted
pools of political intrigue.
We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, clean writer, who was an
honour to letters.
Your loving old
G.P.
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