magnitude is--nay, in the long run, who or what else is? But how much
more if your original man was a king over men; whose movements were
polar, and carried from day to day those of the world along with them.
The Samson Agonistes--were his life passed like that of Samuel Johnson
in dirty garrets, and the produce of it only some bits of written
paper--the Agonistes, and how he will comport himself in the Philistine
mill; this is always a spectacle of truly epic and tragic nature, the
rather if your Samson, royal or other, is not yet blinded or subdued to
the wheel, much more if he vanquish his enemies, _not_ by suicidal
methods, but march out at last flourishing his miraculous fighting
implement, and leaving their mill and them in quite ruinous
circumstances, as this King Friedrich fairly managed to do.
For he left the world all bankrupt, we may say; fallen into bottomless
abysses of destruction; he still in a paying condition, and with footing
capable to carry his affairs and him. When he died, in 1786, the
enormous phenomenon since called FRENCH REVOLUTION was already growling
audibly in the depths of the world, meteoric-electric coruscations
heralding it all round the horizon. Strange enough to note, one of
Friedrich’s last visitors was Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, Comte de
Mirabeau. These two saw one another; twice, for half an hour each time.
The last of the old gods and the first of the modern Titans--before
Pelion leaped on Ossa, and the foul earth taking fire at last, its vile
mephitic elements went up in volcanic thunder. This also is one of the
peculiarities of Friedrich, that he is hitherto the last of the kings;
that he ushers in the French Revolution, and closes an epoch of
world-history. Finishing off forever the trade of king, think many, who
have grown profoundly dark as to kingship and him.
The French Revolution may be said to have, for about half a century,
quite submerged Friedrich, abolished him from the memories of men; and
now, on coming to light again, he is found defaced under strange mud
incrustations, and the eyes of mankind look at him from a singularly
changed, what we must call oblique and perverse point of vision. This is
one of the difficulties in dealing with his history--especially if you
happen to believe both in the French Revolution and in him--that is to
say, both that real kingship is eternally indispensable, and also that
the destruction of sham kingship (a frightful process) is occasionally
so.
On the breaking out of the formidable explosion and suicide of his
century, Friedrich sank into comparative obscurity, eclipsed amid the
ruins of that universal earthquake, the very dust of which darkened all
the air, and made of day a disastrous midnight--black midnight, broken
only by the blaze of conflagrations--wherein, to our terrified
imaginations, were seen, not men, French and other, but ghastly
portents, stalking wrathful, and shapes of avenging gods.
It must be owned the figure of Napoleon was titanic; especially to the
generation that looked on him, and that waited shuddering to be devoured
by him. In general, in that French Revolution, all was on a huge scale;
if not greater than anything in human experience, at least more
grandiose. All was recorded in bulletins, too, addressed to the shilling
gallery; and there were fellows on the stage with such a breadth of
saber, extent of whiskerage, strength of windpipe, and command of men
and gunpowder as had never been seen before. How they bellowed, stalked,
and flourished about, counterfeiting Jove’s thunder to an amazing
degree! Terrific Drawcansir figures of enormous whiskerage, unlimited
command of gunpowder; not without sufficient ferocity, and even a
certain heroism, stage heroism, in them; compared with whom, to the
shilling gallery, and frightened, excited theatre at large, it seemed as
if there had been no generals or sovereigns before; as if Friedrich,
Gustavus, Cromwell, William Conqueror, and Alexander the Great were not
worth speaking of henceforth.
All this, however, in half a century is considerably altered. The
Drawcansir equipments getting gradually torn off, the natural size is
seen better; translated from the bulletin style into that of fact and
history, miracles, even to the shilling gallery, are not so miraculous.
It begins to be apparent that there lived great men before the era of
bulletins and Agamemnon. Austerlitz and Wagram shot away more
gunpowder--gunpowder, probably, in the proportion of ten to one, or a
hundred to one; but neither of them was tenth part such a beating to
your enemy as that of Rossbach, brought about by strategic art, human
ingenuity and intrepidity, and the loss of one hundred and sixty-five
men. Leuthen, too, the battle of Leuthen (though so few English readers
ever heard of it) may very well hold up its head beside any victory
gained by Napoleon or another. For the odds were not far from three to
one; the soldiers were of not far from equal quality; and only the
general was consummately superior, and the defeat a destruction.
Napoleon did, indeed, by immense expenditure of men and gunpowder,
overrun Europe for a time; but Napoleon never, by husbanding and wisely
expending his men and gunpowder, defended a little Prussia against all
Europe, year after year for seven years long, till Europe had enough,
and gave up the enterprise as one it could not manage. So soon as the
Drawcansir equipments are well torn off and the shilling gallery got to
silence, it will be found that there were great kings before Napoleon,
and likewise an art of war, grounded on veracity and human courage and
insight, not upon Drawcansir rodomontade, grandiose Dick-Turpinism,
revolutionary madness, and unlimited expenditure of men and gunpowder.
“You may paint with a very big brush, and yet not be a great painter,”
says a satirical friend of mine. This is becoming more and more
apparent, as the dust-whirlwind and huge uproar of the last generation
gradually dies away again.
Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect demigods; and there are
various things to be said against him with good ground. To the last, a
questionable hero; with much in him which one could have wished not
there, and much wanting which one could have wished. But there is one
feature which strikes you at an early period of the inquiry. That in his
way he is a reality; that he always means what he speaks; grounds his
actions, too, on what he recognizes for the truth; and, in short, has
nothing whatever of the hypocrite or phantasm. Which some readers will
admit to be an extremely rare phenomenon.
We perceive that this man was far indeed from trying to deal
swindler-like with the facts around him; that he honestly recognized
said facts wherever they disclosed themselves, and was very anxious also
to ascertain their existence where still hidden or dubious. For he knew
well, to a quite uncommon degree, and with a merit all the higher as it
was an unconscious one, how entirely inexorable is the nature of facts,
whether recognized or not, ascertained or not; how vain all cunning of
diplomacy, management and sophistry, to save any mortal who does _not_
stand on the truth of things, from sinking in the long run. Sinking to
the very mudgods, with all his diplomacies, possessions, achievements;
and becoming an unnamable object, hidden deep in the cesspools of the
universe. This I hope to make manifest; this which I long ago discerned
for myself, with pleasure, in the physiognomy of Friedrich and his life.
Which, indeed, was the first real sanction, and has all along been my
inducement and encouragement, to study his life and him. How this man,
officially a king withal, comported himself in the eighteenth century,
and managed _not_ to be a liar and charlatan as his century was,
deserves to be seen a little by men and kings, and may silently have
didactic meanings in it.
He that was honest with his existence has always meaning for us, be he
king or peasant. He that merely shammed and grimaced with it however
much, and with whatever noise and trumpet-blowing, he may have cooked
and eaten in this world, can not long have any. Some men do _cook_
enormously (let us call it _cooking_, what a man does in obedience to
his _hunger_ merely, to his desires and passions merely)--roasting whole
continents and populations, in the flames of war or other discord;
witness the Napoleon above spoken of. For the appetite of man in that
respect is unlimited; in truth, infinite; and the smallest of us could
eat the entire solar system, had we the chance given, and then cry, like
Alexander of Macedon, because we had no more solar systems to cook and
eat. It is not the extent of the man’s cookery that can much attach me
to him; but only the man himself, and what of strength he had to wrestle
with the mud-elements, and what of victory he got for his own benefit
and mine.
WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Born in 1708, died 1778, one of the most eminent of English
statesmen and orators. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he spent a
short term in the army, but found his true vocation on being
elected to Parliament in 1737. It was not till 1755 that he became
virtual prime minister. Under his control the arms and diplomacy of
England became generally victorious throughout the world. It was
largely owing to his support that Frederick the Great was finally
victorious over his enemies, and that a great and consistent
foreign policy was inaugurated that raised the nation to a lofty
pitch of glory. The elder Pitt was known as the “great commoner,”
and it was thought derogatory to his fame when he accepted a
peerage. He was the firm and eloquent advocate of the American
colonists in their claims against the mother-country.]
It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as we
look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action stands out
in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of a society
critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of
simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and
of head, skeptical of virtue and enthusiasm, skeptical above all of
itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his
passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy,
his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his
haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more
puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he
appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he
turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of
politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the grandeur
of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. “I know that I can save
the country,” he said to the Duke of Devonshire on his entry into the
ministry, “and I know no other man can.” The groundwork of Pitt’s
character was an intense and passionate pride; but it was a pride which
kept him from stooping to the level of the men who had so long held
England in their hands. He was the first statesman since the restoration
who set the example of a purely public spirit.
Keen as was his love of power, no man ever refused office so often or
accepted it with so strict a regard to the principles he professed. “I
will not go to court,” he replied to an offer which was made him, “if I
may not bring the constitution with me.” For the corruption about him he
had nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle the buying of seats and
the purchase of members. At the outset of his career Pelham appointed
him to the most lucrative office in his administration, that of
paymaster of the forces; but its profits were of an illicit kind, and
poor as he was, Pitt refused to accept one farthing beyond his salary.
His pride never appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude
toward the people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than
“the great commoner,” as Pitt was styled, but his air was always that of
a man who commands popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never
bent to flatter popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves
hoarse for “Wilkes and liberty,” he denounced Wilkes as a worthless
profligate; and when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots,
Pitt haughtily declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had
been the first to enlist on the side of loyalty.
His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which flashed from the small, thin
face, his majestic voice, the fire and grandeur of his eloquence, gave
him a sway over the House of Commons far greater than any other minister
has possessed. He could silence an opponent with a look of scorn, or
hush the whole House with a single word. But he never stooped to the
arts by which men form a political party, and at the height of his power
his personal following hardly numbered half a dozen members.
His real strength, indeed, lay not in Parliament, but in the people at
large. His significant title of “the great commoner” marks a political
revolution. “It is the people who have sent me here,” Pitt boasted with
a haughty pride when the nobles of the cabinet opposed his will. He was
the first to see that the long political inactivity of the public mind
had ceased, and that the progress of commerce and industry had produced
a great middle class which no longer found its representatives in the
legislature. “You have taught me,” said George II, when Pitt sought to
save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, “to look for the
voice of my people in other places than within the House of Commons.”
It was this unrepresented class which had forced him into power. During
his struggle with Newcastle the greater towns backed him with the gift
of their freedom and addresses of confidence. “For weeks,” laughs Horace
Walpole, “it rained gold boxes.” London stood by him through good report
and evil report, and the wealthiest of English merchants, Alderman
Beckford, was proud to figure as his political lieutenant. The temper of
Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the temper of the commercial
England which rallied round him, with its energy, its self-confidence,
its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its moral earnestness. The
merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural attraction to the one
statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish, whose hands were
clean, whose life was pure and full of tender affection for wife and
child. But there was a far deeper ground for their enthusiastic
reverence and for the reverence which his country has borne Pitt ever
since.
He loved England with an intense and personal love. He believed in her
power, her glory, her public virtue, till England learned to believe in
herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs, her defeats his defeats. Her
dangers lifted him high above all thought of self or party spirit. “Be
one people,” he cried to the factions who rose to bring about his fall;
“forget everything but the public! I set you the example!” His glowing
patriotism was the real spell by which he held England. But even the
faults which checkered his character told for him with the middle
classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had been men whose pride
expressed itself in a marked simplicity and absence of pretense. Pitt
was essentially an actor, dramatic in the cabinet, in the House, in his
very office. He transacted business with his clerks in full dress. His
letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was, are stilted and
unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his
affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance which he made on
great debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his crutch by his
side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing into the House
of Commons “the gestures and emotions of the stage.” But the classes to
whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by faults of taste,
and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman who was borne into the
lobby amid the tortures of the gout, or carried into the House of Lords
to breathe his last in a protest against national dishonor.
Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. The power
of political speech had been revealed in the stormy debates of the long
Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance by the legal and
theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung off by the age of
the revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see
ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression,
precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of
business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of
statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole,
no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were
always his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect,
his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the
front. That with defects like these he stood far above every orator of
his time was due above all to his profound conviction, to the
earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. “I must sit still,” he
whispered once to a friend, “for when once I am up everything that is in
my mind comes out.” But the reality of his eloquence was transfigured by
a large and poetic imagination, and by a glow of passion which not only
raised him high above the men of his own day, but set him in the front
rank among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the
common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, a sympathy
with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a command
over the whole range of human feeling. He passed without an effort from
the most solemn appeal to the gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm
to the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by the grand
self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one having
authority. He was in fact the first English orator whose words were a
power, a power not over Parliament only, but over the nation at large.
Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in detached
phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt reached
beyond the walls of St. Stephen’s. But it was especially in these sudden
outbursts of inspiration, in these brief passionate appeals, that the
power of his eloquence lay. The few broken words we have of him stir the
same thrill in men of our day which they stirred in the men of his own.
But passionate as was Pitt’s eloquence, it was the eloquence of a
statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all his
greater struggles, his defense of the liberty of the subject against
arbitrary imprisonment under “general warrants,” of the liberty of the
press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of constituencies against
the House of Commons, of the constitutional rights of America against
England itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preservation of
Prussia, and Prussia has vindicated his foresight by the creation of
Germany. We have adopted his plans for the direct government of India by
the crown, which when he proposed them were regarded as insane. Pitt was
the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church of England.
He was the first to sound the note of parliamentary reform. One of his
earliest measures shows the generosity and originality of his mind. He
quieted Scotland by employing its Jacobites in the service of their
country, and by raising the Highland regiments among its clans. The
selection of Wolfe and Amherst as generals showed his contempt for
precedent and his inborn knowledge of men.
EDMUND BURKE.
BY WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.
[One of the greatest of English statesmen and orators, born in
Ireland in 1730, died 1797. He entered Parliament in 1766, and at
the beginning of the American troubles at once identified himself
with the policy of conciliation and moderation. During his long
parliamentary career Burke distinguished himself in connection with
every political problem which agitated the British Empire, though
he never became prime minister, and was for the most of his life a
member of the opposition. Burke’s speech at the trial of Warren
Hastings is regarded by many critics as the greatest oration ever
delivered in any forum. He was scarcely less distinguished as a
writer on political and philosophical questions than as statesman
and orator.]
There are few men whose depth and versatility have been both so fully
recognized by their contemporaries and whose pre-eminence in many widely
different spheres is so amply attested. Adam Smith declared that he had
found no other man who, without communication, had thought out the same
conclusions on political economy as himself. Winstanley, the Camden
Professor of Ancient History, bore witness to his great knowledge of the
“philosophy, history, and filiation of languages, and of the principles
of etymological deduction.” Arthur Young, the first living authority on
agriculture, acknowledged his obligations to him for much information
about his special pursuits, and it was in a great degree his passion for
agriculture which induced Burke, when the death of his elder brother had
improved his circumstances, to incumber himself with a heavy debt by
purchasing that Beaconsfield estate where some of his happiest days were
spent. His conversational powers were only equaled, and probably not
surpassed, by those of Johnson. Goldsmith described him as “winding into
his subject, like a serpent.” “Like the fabled object of the fairy’s
favors,” said Wilberforce, “whenever he opened his mouth pearls and
diamonds dropped from him.” Grattan pronounced him the best talker he
had ever known. Johnson, in spite of their violent political
differences, always spoke of him with generous admiration. “Burke is an
extraordinary man. His stream of mind is perpetual.... His talk is the
ebullition of his mind. He does not talk for a desire of distinction,
but because his mind is full.... He is the only man whose common
conversation corresponds with the general fame which he has in the
world. Take up what topic you please, he is ready to meet you.... No man
of sense could meet Mr. Burke by accident under a gateway to avoid a
shower without being convinced that he was the first man in England.” It
is not surprising that “he is the first man in the House of Commons, for
he is the first man everywhere.” He once declared that “he knew but two
men who had risen considerably above the common standard--Lord Chatham
and Edmund Burke.”
The admirable proportion which subsisted between his different powers,
both moral and intellectual, is especially remarkable. Genius is often,
like the pearl, the offspring or the accompaniment of disease, and an
extraordinary development of one class of faculties is too frequently
balanced by an extraordinary deficiency of others. But nothing of this
kind can be found in Burke.
His intellectual energy was fully commensurate with his knowledge, and
he had rare powers of bringing illustrations and methods of reasoning
derived from many spheres to bear on any subject he touched, and of
combining an extraordinary natural facility with the most untiring and
fastidious labor. In debate images, illustrations, and arguments rose to
his lips with a spontaneous redundance that astonished his hearers; but
no writer elaborated his compositions more carefully, and his printers
were often aghast at the multitude of his corrections and alterations.
Nor did his intellectual powers in any degree dry up or dwarf his moral
nature. There is no public man whose character is more clearly reflected
in his life and in his intimate correspondence; and it may be
confidently said that there is no other public man whose character was
in all essential respects more transparently pure. Weak health, deep and
fervent religious principles, and studious habits, saved him from the
temptations of youth; and amid all the vicissitudes and corruption of
politics his heart never lost its warmth, or his conscience its
sensitiveness.