as in his intellect--an excessive violence and irritability of temper;
personal antipathies, which were sometimes carried beyond all the
bounds of reason; party spirit, which was too often suffered to obscure
his judgment and to hurry him into great intemperance and exaggeration
of language. But he was emphatically a good man; and in the higher moral
qualities of public as of private life he has not often been surpassed.
That loyal affection with which he clung through his whole life to the
friends of his early youth; that genuine kindness which made him, when
still a poor man, the munificent patron of Barry and Crabbe, and which
showed itself in innumerable acts of unobtrusive benevolence; that
stainless purity and retiring modesty of nature which made his domestic
life so different from that of some of the greatest of his
contemporaries; that depth of feeling which made the loss of his only
son the death-knell of the whole happiness of his life, may be traced in
every stage of his public career. “I know the map of England,” he once
said, “as well as the noble lord, or as any other person, and I know
that the way I take is not the road to preferment.” Fidelity to his
engagements, a disinterested pursuit of what he believed to be right, in
spite of all the allurements of interest and of popularity; a deep and
ardent hatred of oppression and cruelty in every form; a readiness at
all times to sacrifice personal pretensions to party interests; a
capacity of devoting long years of thankless labor to the service of
those whom he had never seen, and who could never reward him, were the
great characteristics of his life, and they may well make us pardon many
faults of temper, judgment, and taste.
In Parliament he had great obstacles to contend with. An Irishman
unconnected with any of the great governing families, and without any of
the influence derived from property and rank, he entered Parliament late
in life and with habits fully formed, and during the greater part of his
career he spoke as a member of a small minority in opposition to the
strong feeling of the House. He was too old and too rigid to catch its
tone, and he never acquired that subtle instinct or tact which enables
some speakers to follow its fleeting moods and to strike with unfailing
accuracy the precise key which is most in harmony with its prevailing
temper. “Of all politicians of talent I ever knew,” wrote Horace
Walpole, “Burke has least political art,” and his defects so increased
with age that the time came when he was often listened to with
undisguised impatience. He spoke too often, too vehemently, and much too
long; and his eloquence, though in the highest degree intellectual,
powerful, various, and original, was not well adapted to a popular
audience.
He had little or nothing of that fire and majesty of declamation with
which Chatham thrilled his hearers, and often almost overawed
opposition, and as a parliamentary debater he was far inferior to
Charles Fox. That great master of persuasive reasoning never failed to
make every sentence tell upon his hearers, to employ precisely and
invariably the kind of arguments that were most level with their
understandings, to subordinate every other consideration to the single
end of convincing and impressing those who were before him. Burke was
not inferior to Fox in readiness and in the power of clear and cogent
reasoning. His wit, though not of the highest order, was only equaled by
that of Townshend, Sheridan, and perhaps North, and it rarely failed in
its effect upon the House. He far surpassed every other speaker in the
copiousness and correctness of his diction, in the range of knowledge he
brought to bear on every subject of debate, in the richness and variety
of his imagination, in the gorgeous beauty of his descriptive passages,
in the depth of the philosophical reflections and the felicity of the
personal sketches which he delighted in scattering over his speeches.
But these gifts were frequently marred by a strange want of judgment,
measure, and self-control.
His speeches were full of episodes and digressions, of excessive
ornamentation and illustration, of dissertations on general principles
of politics, which were invaluable in themselves, but very unpalatable
to a tired or excited house waiting eagerly for a division. As Grattan
once said, “they were far better suited to a patient reader than an
impatient hearer.” Passionately in earnest in the midst of a careless or
half-hearted assembly, seeking in all measures their essential and
permanent tendencies, while his hearers thought chiefly of their
transient and personal aspects, discussing first principles and remote
consequences, among men whose minds were concentrated on the struggle of
the hour, constantly led away by the endless stream of ideas and images
which were forever surging from his brain, he was often interrupted by
his impatient hearers. There is scarcely a perceptible difference
between the style of his essays and the style of his published speeches;
and if the reader selects from his works the few passages which possess
to an eminent degree the flash and movement of spoken rhetoric, he will
be quite as likely to find them in the former as in the latter.
Like most men of great imaginative power, he possessed a highly strung
and oversensitive nervous organization, and the incessant conflicts of
parliamentary life brought it at last into a condition of irritability
that was wholly morbid and abnormal. Though eminently courteous and
amenable to reason in private life, in public he was often petulant,
intractable, and ungovernably violent. His friends sometimes held him
down by the skirts of his coat to restrain the outbursts of his anger.
He spoke with a burning brain and with quivering nerves. The rapid,
vehement, impetuous torrent of his eloquence, kindling as it flowed and
the nervous motions of his countenance reflected the ungovernable
excitement under which he labored; and while Fox could cast off without
an effort the cares of public life and pass at once from Parliament to a
night of dissipation at Brooks’s, Burke returned from debate jaded,
irritated, and soured.
With an intellect capable of the very highest efforts of judicial
wisdom he combined the passions of the most violent partisan, and in the
excitement of debate these too often obtained the ascendency. Few things
are more curious than the contrast between the feverish and passionate
excitement with which he threw himself into party debates and the
admirably calm, exhaustive, and impartial summaries of the rival
arguments which he afterward drew up for the “Annual Register.” Though a
most skillful and penetrating critic, and though his English style is
one of the very finest in the language, his taste was not pure. Even his
best writings are sometimes disfigured by strangely coarse and repulsive
images, and gross violations of taste appear to have been frequent in
his speeches. It is probable that in his case the hasty reports in the
“Parliamentary History” and in the “Cavendish Debates” are more than
commonly defective, for Burke was a very rapid speaker, and his language
had the strongly marked individuality which reporters rarely succeed in
conveying; but no one who judged by these reports would place his
speeches in the first rank, and some of them are wild and tawdry almost
to insanity.
Nor does he appear to have possessed any histrionic power. His voice had
little charm. He had a strong Irish accent, and Erskine described his
delivery as “execrable,” and declared that in some of his finest
speeches he emptied the house.
Gerard Hamilton once said that while everywhere else Burke seemed the
first man, in the House of Commons he appeared only the second. At the
same time there is ample evidence that with all his defects he was from
the first a great power in the House, and that in the early part of his
career, and almost always on occasions of great importance, his
eloquence had a wonderful power upon his hearers. Pitt passed into the
House of Lords almost immediately after Burke had entered the Commons.
Fox was then a boy; Sheridan had not yet become a member; and his
fellow-countryman, Barré, though a rhetorician of great if somewhat
coarse power, was completely eclipsed by the splendor and the variety of
the talents of Burke. Charles Townshend alone, who shone for a few years
with a meteoric brilliancy in English politics, was regarded as his
worthy rival. Johnson wrote to Langton with great delight that Burke by
his first speeches in the House had “gained more reputation than perhaps
any man at his first appearance ever gained before.”
“An Irishman, Mr. Burke, is sprung up,” wrote the American General Lee,
who was then watching London politics with great care, “who has
astonished everybody with the power of his eloquence and his
comprehensive knowledge in all our exterior and internal politics and
commercial interests. He wants nothing but that sort of dignity annexed
to rank and property in England to make him the most considerable man in
the Lower House.” Grattan, who on a question of oratory was one of the
most competent of judges, wrote in 1769, “Burke is unquestionably the
first orator among the Commons of England, boundless in knowledge,
instantaneous in his apprehensions, and abundant in his language. He
speaks with profound attention and acknowledged superiority,
notwithstanding the want of energy, the want of grace, and the want of
elegance in his manner.” Horace Walpole, who hated Burke, acknowledged
that he was “versed in every branch of eloquence,” that he possessed
“the quickest conception, amazing facility of elocution, great strength
of argumentation, all the power of imagination, and memory,” that even
his unpremeditated speeches displayed “a choice and variety of language,
a profusion of metaphors, and a correctness of diction that was
surprising,” and that in public, though not in private life his wit was
of the highest order, “luminous, striking, and abundant.” He complained,
however, with good reason that he “often lost himself in a torrent of
images and copiousness,” that “he dealt abundantly too much in
establishing general positions,” that he had “no address or
insinuation”; that his speeches often showed a great want of sobriety
and judgment, and “the still greater want of art to touch the passions.”
But though their length, their excursiveness, and their didactic
character did undoubtedly on many occasions weary and even empty the
House, there were others in which Burke showed a power both of
fascinating and of moving, such as very few speakers have attained.
Gibbon, whose sinecure place was swept away by the Economical Reform
Bill of 1782, bears testimony to the “delight with which that diffusive
and ingenious orator, Mr. Burke, was heard by all sides of the House,
and even by those whose existence he proscribed.” Walpole has himself
repeatedly noticed the effect which the speeches of Burke produced upon
the hearers. Describing one of those against the American war, he says
that the wit of one part “excited the warmest and most continued bursts
of laughter even from Lord North, Rigby, and the ministers themselves,”
while the pathos of another part “drew iron tears down Barré’s cheek,”
and Governor Johnston exclaimed that “he was now glad that strangers
were excluded, as if they had been admitted Burke’s speech would have
excited them to tear ministers to pieces as they went out of the House.”
Sir Gilbert Elliot, describing one of Burke’s speeches on the Warren
Hastings impeachment, says: “He did not, I believe, leave a dry eye in
the whole assembly.” Making every allowance for the enthusiasm of a
French Royalist for the author of the “Reflections on the French
Revolution,” the graphic description by the Duke de Levis of one of
Burke’s latest speeches on that subject is sufficient to show the
magnetism of his eloquence even at the end of his career. “He made the
whole House pass in an instant from the tenderest emotions of feeling to
bursts of laughter; never was the electric power of eloquence more
imperiously felt. This extraordinary man seemed to raise and quell the
passions of his auditors with as much ease and as rapidly as a skillful
musician passes into the various modulations of his harpsichord. I have
witnessed many, too many political assemblages and striking scenes where
eloquence performed a noble part, but the whole of them appear insipid
when compared with this amazing effort.”
GEORGE WASHINGTON.
BY WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.
[Commander-in-chief of the American armies during the Revolution,
and first President of the United States, born 1732, died 1799.
Washington’s first notable appearance in public life was in the
Braddock expedition of 1755, when, at the age of twenty-three, as
commander of the provincials in the British force, he saved the
remains of the defeated army. Thenceforward he became one of the
most important figures in Virginia. After five years of military
service he resigned his commission and retired to private life,
except doing his duty as member of the Provincial Assembly. When
the colonies took up arms, in 1775, Washington received the
unanimous call to the chief command. At the close of hostilities
General Washington resigned his commission and retired to Mount
Vernon, shunning all connection with public affairs. He was made
president of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and on the
promulgation of the Constitution, it was his transcendent
popularity which was the most important influence in securing its
ratification by the requisite number of States. He was elected
first President, and served for two terms.]
Perhaps the most difficult question, however, was the appointment of a
commander-in-chief; and on no other subject did the Congress exhibit
more conspicuous wisdom. When only twenty-three, Washington had been
appointed commander of the Virginian forces against the French; and in
the late war, though he had met with one serious disaster, and had no
opportunity of obtaining any very brilliant military reputation, he had
always shown himself an eminently brave and skillful soldier. His great
modesty and taciturnity kept him in the background, both in the
provincial legislature and in the Continental Congress; but though his
voice was scarcely ever heard in debate, his superiority was soon felt
in the practical work of the committees. “If you speak of solid
information or sound judgment,” said Patrick Henry about this time,
“Colonel Washington is unquestionably the greatest man in the Congress.”
He appeared in the assembly in uniform, and in military matters his
voice had an almost decisive weight. Several circumstances distinguished
him from other officers, who in military service might have been his
rivals.
He was of an old American family. He was a planter of wealth and social
position, and being a Virginian, his appointment was a great step toward
enlisting that important colony cordially in the cause. The capital
question now pending in America was, how far the other colonies would
support New England in the struggle. In the preceding March, Patrick
Henry had carried a resolution for embodying and reorganizing the
Virginia militia, and had openly proclaimed that an appeal to arms was
inevitable; but as yet New England had borne almost the whole burden.
The army at Cambridge was a New England army, and General Ward, who
commanded it, had been appointed by Massachusetts. Even if Ward were
superseded, there were many New England competitors for the post of
commander; the army naturally desired a chief of their own province, and
there were divisions and hostilities among the New England deputies. The
great personal merit of Washington and the great political importance of
securing Virginia, determined the issue; and the New England deputies
ultimately took a leading part in the appointment. The second place was
given to General Ward, and the third to Charles Lee, an English soldier
of fortune who had lately purchased land in Virginia and embraced the
American cause with great passion. Lee had probably a wider military
experience than any other officer in America, but he was a man of no
settled principles, and his great talents were marred by a very
irritable and capricious temper.
To the appointment of Washington, far more than to any other single
circumstance, is due the ultimate success of the American Revolution,
though in purely intellectual powers Washington was certainly inferior
to Franklin, and perhaps to two or three others of his colleagues. There
is a theory which once received the countenance of some considerable
physiologists, though it is now, I believe, completely discarded, that
one of the great lines of division among men may be traced to the
comparative development of the cerebrum and the cerebellum. To the first
organ it was supposed belong those special gifts or powers which make
men poets, orators, thinkers, artists, conquerors, or wits. To the
second belong the superintending, restraining, discerning, and directing
faculties which enable men to employ their several talents with sanity
and wisdom, which maintain the balance and the proportion of intellect
and character, and make sound judgments and well-regulated lives. The
theory, however untrue in its physiological aspect, corresponds to a
real distinction in human minds and characters, and it was especially in
the second order of faculties that Washington excelled. His mind was not
quick or remarkably original. His conversation had no brilliancy or wit.
He was entirely without the gift of eloquence, and he had very few
accomplishments. He knew no language but his own, and except for a
rather strong turn for mathematics, he had no taste which can be called
purely intellectual. There was nothing in him of the meteor or the
cataract, nothing that either dazzled or overpowered. A courteous and
hospitable country gentleman, a skillful farmer, a very keen sportsman,
he probably differed little in tastes and habits from the better members
of the class to which he belonged; and it was in a great degree in the
administration of a large estate and in assiduous attention to county
and provincial business that he acquired his rare skill in reading and
managing men.
As a soldier the circumstances of his career brought him into the blaze
not only of domestic, but of foreign criticism, and it was only very
gradually that his superiority was fully recognized. Lee, who of all
American soldiers had seen most service in the English army, and Conway,
who had risen to great repute in the French army, were both accustomed
to speak of his military talents with extreme disparagement; but
personal jealousy and animosity undoubtedly colored their judgments.
Kalb, who had been trained in the best military schools of the
Continent, at first pronounced him to be very deficient in the strength,
decision, and promptitude of a general; and, although he soon learned to
form the highest estimate of his military capacity, he continued to
lament that an excessive modesty led him too frequently to act upon the
opinion of inferior men, rather than upon his own most excellent
judgment. In the army and the Congress more than one rival was opposed
to him. He had his full share of disaster; the operations which he
conducted, if compared with great European wars, were on a very small
scale; and he had the immense advantage of encountering in most cases
generals of singular incapacity.
It may, however, be truly said of him that his military reputation
steadily rose through many successive campaigns, and before the end of
the struggle he had outlived all rivalry, and almost all envy. He had a
thorough knowledge of the technical part of his profession, a good eye
for military combinations, and an extraordinary gift of military
administration. Punctual, methodical, and exact in the highest degree,
he excelled in managing those minute details which are so essential to
the efficiency of an army, and he possessed to an eminent degree not
only the common courage of a soldier, but also that much rarer form of
courage which can endure long-continued suspense, bear the weight of
great responsibility, and encounter the risks of misrepresentation and
unpopularity. For several years, and usually in the neighborhood of
superior forces, he commanded a perpetually fluctuating army, almost
wholly destitute of discipline and respect for authority, torn by the
most violent personal and provincial jealousies, wretchedly armed,
wretchedly clothed, and sometimes in imminent danger of starvation.
Unsupported for the most part by the population among whom he was
quartered, and incessantly thwarted by the jealousy of Congress, he kept
his army together by a combination of skill, firmness, patience, and
judgment which has rarely been surpassed, and he led it at last to a
signal triumph.
In civil as in military life, he was pre-eminent among his
contemporaries for the clearness and soundness of his judgment, for his
perfect moderation and self-control, for the quiet dignity and the
indomitable firmness with which he pursued every path which he had
deliberately chosen. Of all the great men in history he was the most
invariably judicious, and there is scarcely a rash word or action or
judgment recorded of him. Those who knew him well, noticed that he had
keen sensibilities and strong passions; but his power of self-command
never failed him, and no act of his public life can be traced to
personal caprice, ambition, or resentment. In the despondency of
long-continued failure, in the elation of sudden success, at times when
his soldiers were deserting by hundreds and when malignant plots were
formed against his reputation, amid the constant quarrels, rivalries,
and jealousies of his subordinates, in the dark hour of national
ingratitude, and in the midst of the most universal and intoxicating
flattery, he was always the same calm, wise, just, and single-minded
man, pursuing the course which he believed to be right, without fear or
favor or fanaticism; equally free from the passions that spring from
interest and from the passions that spring from imagination. He never
acted on the impulse of an absorbing or uncalculating enthusiasm, and he
valued very highly fortune, position, and reputation; but at the command
of duty he was ready to risk and sacrifice them all.
He was in the highest sense of the words a gentleman and a man of honor,
and he carried into public life the severest standard of private morals.
It was at first the constant dread of large sections of the American
people that if the old government were overthrown, they would fall into
the hands of military adventurers, and undergo the yoke of military
despotism. It was mainly the transparent integrity of the character of
Washington that dispelled the fear. It was always known by his friends,
and it was soon acknowledged by the whole nation and by the English
themselves, that in Washington America had found a leader who could be
induced by no earthly motive to tell a falsehood, or to break an
engagement, or to commit any dishonorable act. Men of this moral type
are happily not rare, and we have all met them in our experience; but
there is scarcely another instance in history of such a man having
reached and maintained the highest position in the convulsions of civil
war and of a great popular agitation.
It is one of the great advantages of the long practice of free
institutions, that it diffuses through the community a knowledge of
character and a soundness of judgment which save it from the enormous
mistakes that are almost always made by enslaved nations when suddenly
called upon to choose their rulers. No fact shows so eminently the high
intelligence of the men who managed the American Revolution as their
selection of a leader whose qualities were so much more solid than
brilliant, and who was so entirely free from all the characteristics of
a demagogue. It was only slowly and very deliberately that Washington
identified himself with the revolutionary cause.