Oct. 31, 1756.
Devonshire was now sent to Pitt in the country,[363]but found that his terms were such as the King could not be brought to accept. He positively declined association with Fox in any shape, but deigned to apologise to the Duke for having nominated him without previous consultation. It was necessary, he said, to place some great lord there to whom the Whigs would look up, and his partiality had made him presume to suggest his Grace.[364]
Then the King, refusing Pitt's terms, and aware that he had been misinformed as to Fox's language about Bute, sent for Fox and offered him the government. 'I was never dishonest, rash, or mad enough for half an hour to think of undertaking it,' says Fox.[365]And again, 'I am not capable of it,' and goes on to give the reason. 'Richelieu, were he alive, could not guide the councils of a nation, if (which would be my case) he could not from November to April have above two hours in the four-and-twenty to think of anything but the House of Commons.'[366]If that were Fox's need in 1756, it is difficult to imagine the kind of physical and intellectual combination that he would have thought adequate to the stress of affairs in the twentieth century. But in spite of Fox's private opinion thus expressed, his friend Walpole records that he offered at the worst to take the Treasury and go to the Tower if it would save his Sovereign from having 'his head shaved.' 'Ah!' replied the King with his usualshrewdness, 'if you go to the Tower I shall not be long behind you.'[367]
Then the distracted monarch, at the instigation of Fox, tried the fatal expedient of an Assembly of Notables, and summoned all the leading nobles and commoners who were at hand to meet at Devonshire House.[368]But this meeting never took place, for Devonshire postponed or got rid of it. It was to have recommended that Devonshire should have the Treasury, Fox the Exchequer, and Legge be content with a peerage. Pitt himself was to have the seals, withcarte blanchefor his other friends and dependents. Temple was to be First Lord of the Admiralty.[369]
Fox declares that Devonshire put an end to this plan by positively refusing the Treasury.[370]Holdernesse sent word to Newcastle thatles Renardins(the followers of Fox) were less sanguine.[371]And indeed, on November 4, the day after that fixed for the assembly, Devonshire went in to the King and came out from his audience having accepted the Treasury. Bubb says that he stipulated for Fox as Chancellor of the Exchequer.[372]This is at least doubtful. 'This question,' Fox afterwards wrote, 'I beg may be asked: whether at the time his Grace did take it with Legge I was not pressing him strongly toanother thing, viz., to offer to take it with me. I pressed this even to ill-humour at his own house with Grenville at night. He refused absolutely, and the next morning what he would not take with me he took with Legge.'[373]This would seem conclusive, were it not that Bubb evidently had his information from Fox at the time; but politicians are prone to illusions on the subject of office. In any case, Devonshire left the Closet First Lord of the Treasury with Legge as Chancellor of the Exchequer; the man with whom two days before he had refused under any circumstances to serve,[374]and whom the King had absolutely refused to take. Fox and Bedford were in the anteroom as he came out, and were thunderstruck. Bedford broke into passionate expostulation; Fox scented an intrigue. However, the deed was done.[375]
Fox says that Devonshire offered him, and he refused, the Pay Office.[376]This is difficult to believe, and does not accord with his other statements that he had offered to serve in a subordinate capacity and been refused. Moreover, it was the office for which he always hankered, with its vast profits and safe obscurity, as compared with the Spartan frugality and dangerous prominence of the Secretaryship of State.[377]
As to the intrigue, Fox's instinct did not deceive him. The fact was that Horace Walpole, having heard of the scheme of the Notables, saw at once that it must put anend to the new arrangement, as it was one that Pitt could not accept. Walpole feared no doubt that, in case of failure, Newcastle, the object of his special detestation, might return to office. So he sent his cousin Conway to alarm the Duke of Devonshire, who consequently suppressed the meeting, and who went himself, as we have seen, to the King to accept office.[378]Horace might well pique himself on his powers of intrigue or duplicity, for a week before he had spontaneously written to Fox to say that he heard that the King and Lady Yarmouth were persuaded that Fox would not take the Treasury, but he hoped they were wrong.[379]
The new First Lord of the Treasury may have resisted having Legge as his Chancellor of the Exchequer, but was easily overborne. What is more difficult to understand is the King's nominating Legge, whom he detested. It was a rude shock for Fox, who had planned the meeting of Notables and framed the scheme it was to advise. Henceforth he controlled himself no more, and became the sleepless enemy of the new administration, which can be no matter of surprise. Pitt had made his total exclusion as absolute a condition as that of Newcastle, and Fox after his warm offers of co-operation and assistance could not but be bitterly mortified. He believed, perhaps justly, that the proscription laid on him proceeded from Leicester House.[380]Henceforth during the short life of the new government he plotted and planned against it, inspiring 'The Test,' a new paper under an old designation, withvenomous articles, and ready to form alternative administrations at a moment's notice.[381]
One great difficulty, the King's repugnance to Legge, had been surmounted one does not know how; but there were still minor obstacles. The whole arrangement was odious to the Sovereign: he could not bear even to turn the first page of Devonshire's appointments. Pitt, who was to succeed Newcastle in the Southern department, wished to exchange this for the Northern. The King objected, for the Northern department included Hanover, and Pitt eventually yielded. The new Secretary, as we have seen, wished for Sir Thomas Robinson, his old butt, as a colleague, on the singular ground that he knew nothing of the office he was undertaking, and required Sir Thomas's guidance.[382]Pitt had compared Robinson to a jack-boot; but personal opinions vary according to points of view; Sir Thomas might be contemptible as a leader, but useful as a dry-nurse. Holdernesse however remained. Then over every petty office, coffererships, masterships of the Wardrobe, keeperships of the jewels, treasurerships of the Household, there was snarling and struggling as of dogs over bones. Bedford was secured as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, mainly, it would appear, through the agency of Fox, who wished to secure as many ministerial posts as possible for his friends, and who was in hopes that the Duke would traverse Pitt. Bedford cared little for office; perhaps not much for Fox. His political passions were inspired by his personal hatreds, of Newcastle now, as later of Pitt.[383]But Fox, aided by theDuchess's ambition, prevailed. Amid these changes one provokes a smile; Bubb was as usual dismissed.
But the greatest and most grotesque disability lay with Pitt himself. After all his struggles to be in the position of forming a Ministry, he had no Ministry to produce. He could not fill a fraction of the offices. His personal followers, all told, hardly exceeded a dozen. When he had provided for the Grenvilles, Potter, and Legge, he had scarcely any one to name. So this Ministry was doomed from the beginning. Pamphleteers could not fail to observe Pitt's predicament. One lampoon, in the form of a royal degree, 'Given at our imperial seat at Hayes,' and countersigned 'John Thistle,' (a premature allusion to Bute), sets forth: 'We will that you give lucrative employments to all Our Brethren, uncles, cousins, relations and namesakes.'[384]Outside this category Pitt's subordinates were mostly the friends of Newcastle or Fox, and so his secret enemies, or waiters upon Providence who were not sufficiently sure of his stability to call themselves his friends. Holdernesse, Pitt's colleague in the Secretaryship of State, and Barrington, Secretary for War, kept Newcastle fully informed of all that went on in the administration and of all that they knew. Holdernesse also sent abstracts of the despatches that came from abroad.[385]So that Pitt was betrayed from the first. Ministries formed by one man seldom last long under another. But Ministries which pass between two declared enemies have not from the beginning any chance of life. This one was stillborn.
Pitt himself lay ill with the gout at Hayes; so he had to leave his affairs to be managed by a little clique in London,of which Temple of course was the chief, and which was in close communion with Leicester House. For every day Leicester House waxed and Kensington Palace waned in importance, as the King advanced in years. Nothing in the history of those days is more difficult to trace and yet nothing is more significant than this invisible Court of the Heir-Apparent, which was felt rather than seen, but towards which courtiers kept one anxious eye during their dutiful attendance on the King. All felt that the centre of power was shifting thither, and the uneasiness of those who wished to be well with both Courts was manifest and irrepressible. The constant anxiety of Fox to be Paymaster was largely due to his desire to be sheltered from the hatred of the young Court in the reign that seemed imminent. All this could not but increase the jealousy and irritability of the old Sovereign, at a time when he was undergoing a new Ministry most repulsive to him. Distasteful as it was in almost every respect, what was perhaps most abhorrent was the consciousness that it was imposed upon him by his daughter-in-law and her favourite, that it rested on their support, and was indeed the Ministry of George III. rather than of George II.
Bute was the object of the King's chief detestation, a righteous aversion if his suspicions were well founded; and Bute was now undisguisedly prominent in the negotiations for the new Government. The King treated Temple and his friends so ill at the levee, that the injured nobleman went to Devonshire to say that he feared he could not proceed a step further in the negotiations. On this mission he was accompanied by Bute, for the purpose, apparently, of making the world realise that LeicesterHouse and all its influence were behind Pitt. And Bute availed himself of this opportunity to make use of 'expressions so transcendently obliging to us,' writes Temple, 'and so decisive of the determined purposes of Leicester House towards us in the present or any future day, that your lively imagination cannot suggest to you a wish beyond them.' By Temple, too, he sent word to Pitt that he could not advise, that he left all to Pitt, determined to support and approve whatever Pitt decided.[386]This was the one element of strength to the new Government, besides Pitt himself. And yet, so elusive was this mysterious Court, that in September the town had been ringing with the coolness of Pitt's reception at Leicester House, more especially by Bute.[387]The fact is that there had evidently been a coldness, but that the fall of Newcastle had brought the two together again.[388]
After Devonshire had kissed hands on November 4 there were however few difficulties. Temple's cold reception at Court, on the very day of Newcastle's resignation, which had made him declare with his usual arrogance to Devonshire that all was over, was only a passing incident, due to the fact that the King could not abide the very sight of Temple. Pitt no doubt counselled moderation from Hayes, not desiring to lose the fruit of so many years for a slight to his relative. And so, a week after Temple's fiery declaration to Devonshire, the new Board of Admiralty was gazetted with Temple at its head. Three days before, the Board of Treasury had been declaredwith Devonshire and Legge as its chiefs. One Grenville was included in this. For George Grenville and Potter treasurerships and paymasterships were found. There were indeed but few traces of Pitt's small connection in the Government. He, still an invalid, received his seals a little later. He had also to change hisDec. 4, 1756.seat. He could not condescend to be re-elected for Newcastle's borough of Aldborough; indeed, he had held it too long. Nor indeed would Newcastle nominate him.[389]So now he accepted an olive branch from Lyttelton, who shared the control of Okehampton with the Duke of Bedford, and generously named his old friend and recent foe.[390]It may have been that Pitt was desirous of cutting the last link with Newcastle before entering upon office, and had deferred receiving the seals till he was independent. Be that as it may, he was only to hold them four months. During most of that time he was ill, during all of it he was surrounded by conspiracies, and he was soon intrigued out of office, though he never actually vacated it. But his short term had taught him one priceless lesson; that genius and public spirit were not enough, that a practical and even sordid leaven was required, and that if he would not do the necessary work of political adjustment himself, he must find somebody to do it for him, or give up all idea of being a powerful Minister.
It has been thought well to narrate at length thecircumstances of the final breakdown of the King's veto on Pitt's accession to office and the struggle which preceded it; partly because some of the documents are new, partly because it is a curious picture of character and intrigue, partly because it is the fifth and culminating act of this long drama.
Butwith this Government we have nothing to do. We have reached our limits. The youth of Pitt has passed, his apprenticeship is over, he has now his foot in high office, he is soon to be supreme. The weary period of proscription and conflict has come to an end, he is henceforth to command where he has obeyed, and he is to raise his country to a singular height of glory and power. That splendid period is beyond the scope of this book, which only records the ascent and the toil; the lustre of achievement and reward require a separate chronicle. The next scenes require a broader canvas and brighter colours.
But before we leave him let us try and realise his appearance. When we read about any one we naturally wish to know what manner of man he was in the flesh. In this case we seem but scantily provided with portraits. We have glanced at the one by Hoare, to the accuracy of which Pitt himself bears emphatic testimony. Of this one Hoare painted several replicas, one of the worst of which, very bilious in colouring, is in the National Portrait Gallery. There is another at Orwell which seems to have more force in it; it could not have less. The original represents a comely, graceful and elegant being without a symptom of anything but comeliness, grace and elegance,and might be the portrait of any man of fashion of the time. Great men have sometimes piqued themselves on being dandies, and it may have been this air which recommended the picture to its subject. This portrait, of which the large engraving, containing only the head, is infinitely better than the original, duly arrived at Stowe. Thence at the dispersal of that great collection it passed to Drayton, having been purchased by Sir Robert Peel, and has lately found a final home at Pittsburg.
There is another portrait by Hoare, at full length, in the coronation robes which Pitt never can have worn, which was painted for the Corporation of Bath ten years after that for Temple. It leaves no special impression. There was a portrait by Reynolds at Belvoir. But that, alas! disappeared with so much else in the great fire which ravaged that noble structure. Towards the end of his life (in 1772) he was painted in peer's robes by Brompton. The engraving of this is at full length, but the picture itself is a kitcat, so that it was probably cut down. This picture is at Chevening, and Lord Sidmouth, if we are not mistaken, owns a replica or another version of this picture. Pitt's grand-daughter, Lady Hester Stanhope, who was brought up with it, says that it is the best portrait of him. As she was only two years old when he died, her testimony, though given with confidence, has no personal value; but she had relations who may have told her. She piqued herself on her resemblance to him. But no value is to be attached to the utterances of this vain and crazy woman, unless one can believe, which is difficult, that she repeated faithfully what more trustworthy people had told her. However, this portrait may well be the best, where the other is so poor.It is in itself impressive, representing a solemn, noble, melancholy figure, such as Chatham must have been in his last cheerless decade.
There are more busts. There is one of him in youth, perhaps at five-and-twenty, handsome, bright, alert, with a smile that is almost saucy. The original of this was, it is believed, also at Stowe; also, perhaps, purchased by Sir Robert Peel. There is more than one by Wilton. One, dated 1759, grim and masterful, with a touch of scorn, the man himself at his time of power. There are others of him in old age, with less expression, ponderous and saturnine; they are posthumous, and dated 1781. One of these is at Dropmore, another at Belvoir, another at Lowther.
There are probably other portraits or busts, but these are all that are known to the present writer.
His appearance at his best must have been extremely attractive. Tall and slender, 'his figure genteel and commanding,' he had cultivated all the arts of grace, gesture and dramatic action. 'Graceful in motion,' says his reluctant nephew, 'his eye and countenance would have conveyed his feelings to the deaf.'[391]All authorities dwell on the magic of his eye. His eyes, said his grand-daughter, presumably on family tradition, were grey, but by candlelight seemed black from the intensity of their expression. When he was angry or earnest no one could look him in the face. No one indeed seems to have been able to abide the terrors of his glance.
Of his manners and conversation in private life we know singularly little. Chesterfield gives us perhaps the best glimpse. 'He had manners and address; but one mightdiscern through them too great a consciousness of his own superior talents. He was a most agreeable and lively companion in social life, and had such a versatility of wit that he could adapt it to all sorts of conversation.' Of his early powers of fascination we have an authentic instance. He was seen walking with the Prince of Wales in the gardens at Stowe, and Cobham, watching them with anxiety, expressed some apprehension of Pitt's persuading the Prince to adopt some measures of which Cobham disapproved. A Mr. Belson said that the interview could not be long. 'You don't know Mr. Pitt's power of insinuation,' said Cobham. 'In a very short quarter of an hour he can persuade anyone of anything.'
Butler, 'the Reminiscent,' who had this anecdote from Belson himself, goes on to say that 'as a companion in festive moments, Mr. Pitt was enchanting.' He also quotes Wilkes, who was a good judge of social qualifications. 'Mr. Pitt, by the most manly sense and the fine sallies of a warm and sportive imagination, can charm the whole day, and, as the Greek said, his entertainments please even the day after they are given.' But, after all, these must have been rare occasions, as Pitt does not seem to have seen much of society, for his health kept him a recluse; and as years went on he seems to have found it both irksome and impolitic to see much of mankind. We fancy that he was a man, like his son, of small and intimate companies; partly from a haughty aloofness, partly because he could not partake of the pleasures of the table.
'As a private man,' says Lord Camelford, 'he had especially in his youth every talent to please when he thought it worth while to exert his talents, which wasalways for a purpose, for he was never natural. His good breeding never deserted him unless when his insolence intended to offend. He was, however, soon spoilt by flattery, which gave him the humours of a child. He was selfish even to trifles in his own family and amongst his intimates to the forgetting the preferences due to the other sex, of which I have heard many ridiculous instances; but this was much owing to a state of health which made him fretful, at the same time that it called his attention to his own person. When I first saw him he was intemperate towards his servants full as much as my own father, but it is to his honour that when he owed a better example to his children he got the better of that habit. His first and only friendships were with Lord Lyttelton and his sister Ann.' In a later passage he adds: 'He lived and died without a friend.'
Camelford, it will be observed, speaks with confidence about Pitt's youth, of which he can have known nothing except from tradition, and Pitt's family traditions were not likely to err on the side of benignity. What he says about early friendships is obviously inaccurate; he is quoting Pitt's impulsive note of Oct. 24, 1734.[392]The Grenvilles, the other Lytteltons, and Gilbert West at once occur to one as friends to whom Pitt in youth was tenderly attached. We may indeed take it for granted that this curious piece refers to Pitt's middle life, which Camelford knew personally; but it is too interesting to be omitted here.
His great and singular power lay in his eloquence, and yet even there we are left largely to the recollection and testimony of his contemporaries, for there was in those days no reporting as we understand it, and thereforeno reports. There are, of course, professed reports, but to these little credence can be attached. Dr. Johnson and a Scottish clergyman named Gordon wrote a great number of them, based on very inadequate materials, if any materials at all. Men carried away some noble outburst or some striking metaphor tingling in their ears, and repeated it. Others would be able to recall the line of argument, if indeed there was an argument to follow. But the result is scarcely authentic. Pitt the younger must have known, and he declared that no specimens of his father's eloquence remained. Butler says that the person to whom he made this remark (no doubt Butler himself) begged him to read slowly his father's speeches on the Stamp Act, and endeavour as he did so to recall the figure, look and voice with which his father would have delivered them. Pitt did so, and admitted the probable effect of the speech thus delivered. But it is to be observed that he did not admit the accuracy. Almon, who knew something of this matter, says that none of the reports of Pitt's speeches before 1760 can be depended upon. In 1766 Almon began reporting the debates himself, and so would claim greater exactness, and may easily have attained it.
One is in fact thrown back on the impressions and the descriptions of those who heard him. Horace Walpole, who at this time admired Pitt as much as he could admire anybody, gives us striking glimpses, some of which we have already quoted; one of which, that of the answer to Hume Campbell, is exquisite in felicity of phrase. Chesterfield says that Pitt's 'eloquence was of every kind, and he excelled in the argumentative as well as in the declamatory way. But his invectives were terrible, and uttered withsuch energy of diction, and stern dignity of action and countenance that he intimidated those who were the most willing and the best able to encounter him. Their arms fell out of their hands, and they sank under the ascendant which his genius gained over theirs.' In a note Chesterfield tells us that the last phrases allude to Murray and Hume Campbell. 'Mr. Pitt,' he says elsewhere, 'carried with him unpremeditated the strength of thunder and the splendour of lightning.' These extracts convey the impression made by Pitt on one of the acutest judges of the time, himself an orator of eminence, and no friend to his subject.
Bishop Newton gladly avails himself of the same familiar metaphor: 'What was said of the famous orator Pericles, that he lightened, thundered, and confounded Greece, was in some measure applicable to him.' 'He had,' says the Bishop, 'extraordinary powers, quick conceptions, ready elocution, great command of language, a melodious voice, a piercing eye, a speaking countenance, and was as great an actor as an orator. During the time of his successful administration he had the most absolute and uncontrolled sway that perhaps any member ever had in the House of Commons. With all these excellences he was not without his defects. His language was sometimes too figurative and pompous, his speeches were seldom well connected, often desultory and rambling from one thing to another, so that though you were struck here and there with noble sentiments and happy expressions, yet you could not well remember nor give a clear account of the whole together. With affected modesty he was apt to be rather too confident and overbearing in debate, sometimes descended to personal invectives, and would first commend that he might afterwardsmore effectually abuse, would ever have the last word, and right or wrong still preserved (in his own phrase) an unembarrassed countenance. He spoke more to your passions than to your reason, more to those below the bar and above the throne than to the House itself; and, when that kind of audience was excluded, he sunk and lost much of his weight and authority.'[393]
Grattan's testimony, as that of a famous orator, cannot here be passed, though it refers to a later period. 'He was a man of great genius, great flight of mind. His imagination was astonishing.... He was very great and very odd. He spoke in a style of conversation, not however what I expected. It was not a speech, for he never came with a prepared harangue. His style was not regular oratory, like Cicero or Demosthenes, but it was very fine and very elevated, and above the ordinary subjects of discourse.... His gesture was always graceful. He was an incomparable actor. Had it not been so he would have appeared ridiculous.... His tones were remarkably pleasing. I recollect his pronouncing one word "effete" in a soft charming accent. His son could not have pronounced it better.... His manner was dramatic. In this it was said that he was too much the mountebank; but if so it was a great mountebank. Perhaps he was not so good a debater as his son, but he was a much better orator, a better scholar, and a far greater mind. Great subjects, great empires, great characters, effulgent ideas and classical illustrations formed the material of his speeches.' Grattan gives examples, and even notes of one of his speeches, but they are all outside our period.[394]
These notes on Pitt's oratory cannot well be omitted, though they are almost too familiar to quote. But there is one, never yet published, which is written by an intimate but merciless critic. Lord Camelford was only nineteen at the time when our narrative terminates, but he must already and for some years afterwards have been steeped in his uncle's eloquence, so that his description is of peculiar interest.
'In Parliament he never spoke but to the instant, regardless of whatever contradictions he might afterwards be reduced to, which he carried off with an effrontery without example. His eloquence was supported by every advantage that could unite in a perfect actor. Graceful in motion, his eye and countenance would have conveyed his feelings to the deaf. His voice was clear and melodious, and capable of every variety of inflection and modulation. His wit was elegant, his imagination inexhaustible, his sensibility exquisite, and his diction flowed like a torrent, impure often, but always varied and abundant. There was a style of conscious superiority, a tone, a gesture of manner, which was quite peculiar to him—everything shrunk before it; and even facts, truth and argument were overawed and vanquished by it. On the other hand, his matter was never ranged, it had no method. He deviated into a thousand digressions, often reverted back to the same ground, and seemed sometimes like the lion to lash himself with his own tail to rouse his courage, which flashed in periods and surprised and astonished, rather than convinced by the steady light of reason. He was the very contrast of Lord Mansfield, his competitor in eloquence, who never appealed but to the conviction of the understanding, with an arrangementso precise that every sentence was only the preparation for the force that the next was to obtain, and scarce a word could be taken away without throwing the whole argument into disorder; the other bore his hearers away by rapid flights into a region that looked down upon argument, and opposed the transport of feeling to conviction.'
This appears to be a description as accurate as it is vivid, and perhaps none gives the personality and manner of Pitt with more effect. The style of conscious superiority, peculiar to him, before which everything shrank; the way in which the orator worked himself into wrath, like a lion lashing himself with his own tail; the eye and countenance which would have conveyed his meaning to the deaf; these are touches which we feel to be accurate, and which seem to explain much of the effect of Pitt's oratory. Let us here note that Cradock gives a curious account of an oratorical failure of Pitt's in later life and of his consequent irritation, eminently comforting to humbler speakers.[395]
We value sketches like these much more than any professed reports of Pitt's speeches, which cannot be accurate reproductions. But, even if they were, they would, we are told, be but pale shadows of the reality, for so much depended on the soul and grace with which they were uttered; for the majesty of his presence, his manly figure, his exquisite voice, his consummate acting, his harmonious action, and above all the lightning of his eyes inspired reluctant awe before he uttered a word. We can fancy him rising in the House, which subsides at once into silence and eager attention. On not a few faces therewill be uneasiness and alarm; on the ministerial bench some agitation, for it is there probably that the thunderbolts may fall. His opening is solemn and impressive. Then he warms to his subject. He states his argument. He recalls matters of history and his own personal recollections. Then with an insinuating wave of his arm his voice changes, and he is found to be drowning some hapless wight with ridicule. Then he seems to ramble a little, he is marking time and collecting himself for what is coming. Suddenly the rich notes swell into the fullness of a great organ, and the audience find themselves borne into the heights of a sublime burst of eloquence. Then he sinks again into a whisper full of menace which carries some cruel sarcasm to some quivering heart. Then he is found playing about his subject, pelting snowballs as he proceeds. If the speech is proceeding to his satisfaction it will last an hour or perhaps two. Its length will perhaps not improve it, but no one can stir. There may be ineffective, tedious, obscure passages, but no one knows what may be coming, these vapours often precede a glowing sunburst. So all through the speech men sit as though paralysed, though many are heated with wine. He will not finish without some lofty declamation which may be the culminating splendour of the effort. If any effective replies are made, he will reply again and again, heedless of order, vehement, truculent, perhaps intemperate. And as he sits down perhaps with little applause, the tension of nerves, almost agonising in its duration and concentration, snaps like a harpstring; the buzz of animated conversation breaks forth with an ecstasy of relief. The audience dispersesstill under the spell. As it wears off, hostile critics begin to declare that it is all acting; the fellow acts better than Garrick. Garrick, indeed, himself declared that had Pitt originally preferred the stage of Drury Lane for that of St. Stephen's, he would almost have annihilated the stage by distancing all competition.[396]He was, without doubt, an incomparable actor, for no less a power would have enabled him to engage in some of his most famous flights with effect, or without reaction or ridicule. His action, his inflections, his vehemence are no doubt at least as good as Garrick's. But these are merely the accessories which to the shallow or cynical observer seem to be the heart or the whole of the matter. One might as well say that it is the varnish that makes the picture, or the goblet that makes the vintage. The orator is probably unconscious or at most half-conscious of what seems dramatic, he is moved by an irresistible blast of passion which carries him as well as his audience away. The passion may have been stirred beforehand, but at the moment of outpouring it is genuine enough. Pitt no doubt had trained himself to be graceful in animation, had studied and enhanced the beauties of his voice, so that when excited his tones were always musical, and his action harmonious. He may in earlier days have rehearsed speeches in private, though he probably delivered something different when the time came. But to imagine that when he spoke he was acting a prepared speech is to ignore the main features of his oratory, the force coming from an internal impulse which was for the moment irresistible. It should be remembered too, thatin one sense he was always acting in the common business of life; when he chipped an egg, or talked to his gardener, or mounted his horse, he was acting. He might not, indeed, study his gesture at the moment, but that was because he had been studying gestures half his life. He had appropriated the dramatic way of doing things till it had become a second nature to him; thus, what would have been acting in others was natural to him. And indeed, he had so adjusted and prepared and schooled himself, that all his emotions were effectually concealed. The fierce character of the man would sometimes be irrepressible, but even then it would be vented with an awful grace. And so when he was said to be acting in the House he was natural, for acting had become a second nature to him. When this is so, acting has ceased to be acting. Mrs. Siddons would give her orders at dinner in the awful tones of Lady Macbeth. This was not acting but nature, trained but unconscious nature. So it was with Pitt. He would not laugh, because it was undignified to laugh. If he had a book or a play to read aloud and came to a comic part, he passed it to another to read and resumed the volume when the humorous part was over, lest, we may presume, he should smile or become incidentally ridiculous. His countenance was, so to speak, enamelled with such anxious care, that a heedless laugh might crack the elaborate demeanour. And so he lived in blank verse, and conducted himself in the heroic metre. We should surmise, though not with certainty, that some of his more famous flights, such as the comparison of the Rhone and the Saône, were prepared to some extent, but that there was nothingwritten. This is only guesswork, for of his method of preparation we know nothing. But his diction was habitually perfect. To improve it he had twice read through Bailey's Dictionary, and had plodded through masses of sermons, particularly those of Barrow, Abernethy, and 'the late Mr. Mudge of Plymouth.'[397]'Every word he makes use of,' said Chesterfield as early as 1751, 'is the very best, and the most expressive that can be used in that place.' That was the result of constant and familiar effort. Like Bolingbroke he had trained himself to spare no pains in ordinary conversation to attain accuracy of expression, so as to be sure of himself in public. 'It would not be believed how much trouble he took to compose the most trifling note.' He told Shelburne that a phrase he had used in one of his speeches could not be taken exception to, as he had tried it on paper three times before employing it in public. Assiduous study of words, constant exercise in choice language, so that it was habitual to him even in conversation, and could not be other than elegant even in unpremeditated speech, this combined with poetical imagination, passion, a mordant wit and great dramatic skill, would probably seem to be the secrets of Chatham's oratorical supremacy. And yet it is safe to predict that a clever fellow who had mastered all this would produce but a pale reflection of the original. It is not merely the thing that is said, but the man who says it which counts, the character which breathes through the sentences. Mirabeau would, as we know, take a manuscript speech produced by a laborious friend, in itself a dull thing, and read it from the tribune with suchenergy of inspiration that it would carry the Assembly by storm. This is the more marvellous when we remember that a man who reads the best possible speech with the most effective elocution is heavily handicapped. And so it may safely be assumed that imitation of Pitt would be doomed to disastrous failure. The secret of oratory like this evades the most anxious student: its effect both on the immediate audience and on posterity seems beyond definition or adequate explanation.
Some orators impress their audience, some their readers, a very few posterity as well. The orators who impress their audience rarely impress their readers, and those who impress their readers are usually less successful with their audience. Few indeed are those who reach posterity or indeed survive a year. Pitt, if any one indeed can be said to have read his speeches, combined all three forms of supremacy. More than this, his utterances with a sort of wireless telegraphy seemed to thrill the nation which neither heard nor read them. In the century which followed Chatham's death there was an illustrious succession of orators and debaters. And yet none of these eminent men with all their accurately reported speeches have left so deep an impress of eloquence as the elder Pitt, who was not reported at all. We cannot doubt that it is better for his fame that he was unreported. Sheridan never did anything wiser than when in his need he refused the most splendid offers to revise his Begum speech for publication. Pitt's speeches would have lost half their force without the splendour of delivery. His unreported eloquence has become matter of faith, and so it is likely to remain.
Mr. Lecky, from whom it is difficult to differ, thinksthat his speeches were deficient in pathos and wit. As to this last, the testimony of his contemporaries is emphatic the other way, and they are loud in extolling Pitt's piercing wit. We have seen how Walpole and Murray concur in extolling his powers of ridicule. 'He can turn anything into ridicule,' Murray had said. 'He can tickle to death with a feather,' was Walpole's description. Nor should we imagine he was defective in pathos; not perhaps in youth, for youth is not the season of pathos, but certainly in later years. The speeches, for example, delivered in the garb of an invalid, abounded we should surmise in pathos, to which the costume was preliminary and accessory. But pathos, which has something of humility in its tenderness, was, it must be admitted, alien to the haughty superiority which Pitt asserted and assumed.
One word more of fascinating conjecture. Would he have been a great popular orator at mass meetings and the like? We cannot imagine Pitt a platform speaker, yet we can scarcely imagine a better. His graceful appearance, his terrible eye, the winning and majestic modulations of his voice, his spontaneity, his magnetic power, his wealth of ridicule, his poignant personalities, his dramatic force, his variety and unexpectedness constituted the most formidable equipment for platform oratory ever possessed by mortal man. And yet we cannot regret that he never was tried.
Pitt's life marks itself out with singular distinctness into definite periods. From 1708 to 1734 is the period of obscure youth, on which this volume should throw some light. From 1734 to 1745 is the period of reckless and irresponsible opposition, when he is trying the temper of his weapons. From 1745 to 1754 he remains in the shadow ofsubordinate office. From 1754 to 1756, though still partly in office, he emerges as an independent figure of extraordinary and irresistible force. From 1756 to 1761 is the period of power, four years of which are unrivalled in the annals of Great Britain. From 1761 to 1770 is the period of detachment, or attempted detachment, from party. It includes some tenure of office, much obscurity and illness, some actual insanity. And from 1770 till his death in 1778 he appears sometimes to be attempting to make his peace with the party system, having found it impracticable to stand alone; sometimes he seems to be retiring once more into his cell.
Few careers can be marked out so clearly; few have such a glamour. But the glamour and the glory are yet to come; they lie beyond this book. Already indeed there are confidence and hope, confidence in his vigour, his honesty, and his uprightness; but this is due rather to others than to himself. Every one else has failed, this may be the man of destiny.
And yet up to this time the career of Pitt has been, eloquence apart, not unlike that of other ambitious and not very scrupulous politicians. He begins by attacking Sir Robert Walpole. Why? He has no particular objection to Sir Robert Walpole; in after years he acknowledges that he was a great statesman. It was partly a freak of youth. Who is the biggest man to attack, the man by combating whom one can acquire the most honour and reputation? Obviously Walpole. So tilt at him. He is asked to an important house; for the first time he finds himself in the great world. He is caressed, perhaps flattered; for he has a school renown, and is a lad to be secured. He is withhis Eton friends, and they think all the world of Cobham, his wisdom, his courage, his magnificence; they all in a measure depend on him. Thus he is allured into the charmed circle, and they form much the same group as that which was in our own days called the Fourth Party.
So they enter the House of Commons in high spirits, and lay about them with reckless intrepidity. Pitt is soon marked out for martyrdom by the Minister. But in a short time he is conspicuous for other reasons. He towers from the waist above his comrades as a bitter, incisive speaker. Walpole begins to take notes of his speeches; he is the coming man, and is at once secured for the faction of the Prince of Wales. Then Walpole falls. There is a great crash, and the spectators expect to see the world in ruins. But when the dust has cleared away it is seen that things are much as they were; Wilmington, scarcely visible, in Walpole's seat; Newcastle rooted in his own; Walpole, with Pulteney his protagonist, seated smug and dumb among the distant peers. There is no room for Pitt among our governors; the only new figure that strikes one is Carteret, he is evidently the moving spirit of the piece. As the prominent Minister, and as an object of hatred to Cobham, he is obviously the man for Pitt now to attack, and he trounces Carteret as recklessly as he had Walpole; only Walpole was able to reply, and Carteret cannot; for he sits where Walpole sits. Carteret, again, he mainly attacks for his eminence. He calls Carteret execrable now, but, when the battle is over, takes pride in declaring that to his patronage, to his friendship, to his instruction 'I owe whatever I am.' Still, the business of party must be done, and so Carteret must be assailed. Then Carteret disappears,and Pitt is without a target. But the young man has to realise that in his reckless onslaughts he has incidentally but mortally wounded the honour of the King. Walpole and Carteret are off the scene; and the stage is now occupied, so far as he is concerned, by a monarch who is an incarnate veto as regards him, and who can never forgive him. This produces a new situation. Pitt is as strenuous to be pardoned as he was to offend; he is all milk and honey in public, but apprises the Pelhams, who are now in sole possession of the administration, that he is not disposed to be long-suffering, and that the ordinary rewards of political warfare are overdue. They are fully alive to the situation, and attempt to mollify the Sovereign. But their labour is in vain, and so, with more subtlety than patriotism, they produce a ministerial crisis when civil war is alive in the island. The King has to yield, and, in angry submission, receive Pitt. The new placeman, having achieved office, subsides into a long silence. Pelham dies at last, and the great inheritance has to be divided. Pitt is ill and absent; his rival is at once preferred (though alienated); while Pelham's brother attempts to guide, with the help of the Master of the Great Wardrobe, what Pelham could not control. The result is easily foreseen. The rivals unite to tear the Master limb from limb, and one of them has to be bought off. That one is not Pitt. And now something, pique or patriotism or marriage, one cannot analyse it now, perhaps he could not have analysed it himself, lifts him into new splendours of eloquence. His rival seems cowed by the harness without the confidence of office. Pitt stands alone, no one dare face him. Meanwhile he receives new authority from disaster. Inevery region where Britain is interested calamity follows calamity. The country is roused to a passion of wrath and vengeance. It demands victims. Byng in prison remains an open wound to remind the nation of its miscarriages. They are resolved to shoot him, at any rate; they would not be unwilling to hang others whom they hold responsible for his miscarriage, who are perhaps corrupt, and who are certainly incapable and untoward Ministers; failing that, they will at least get rid of them. They look round and see no one but Pitt. He has been persecuted, he has been ignored by these Ministers, and yet his eloquence, commanding in itself, has the true note of energy and patriotism. He shall be tried; and they call for him with as much energy as the French once called for Necker, but with a truer instinct.
Strangely enough, there is so far little vigour in Pitt except in his speeches. Half his life is spent in prostration and seclusion, under the martyrdom of gout. As we have seen, on the very brink of his Ministry, he assured Fox that his health would not allow him to hold office. And, indeed, in the whole life of this singular man there is nothing more remarkable than this, that in the glimpses we obtain of himself, apart from great speeches and the result of victorious policy, we almost always find him prostrate with illness. It is generally the gout or its allies which disable him; but later it is disorder akin to if not identical with insanity. Not unnaturally, even among those less prone by profession to suspicion than the expert politician, his ill-health is often supposed to be an assumption or a screen. But in this calmer generation we can see that it was not, that the man never enjoyedhealth, as it is ordinarily understood, for a moment. He was always distempered, irritable, or hysterical, when not in pain. His public life was scarcely more than the intervals between fits of gout or nervous collapse. We are reminded of the sufferings of his son, as he approached the end of a long ministerial career, struggling against constant sickness and a wrecked constitution, when we contemplate the lifelong contest between the elder Pitt and hereditary disease.
Heredity counts for much, for more than we reckon in these matters. We breed horses and cattle with careful study on that principle; the prize bull and the Derby winner are the result. With mankind we heed it little or not at all. With Pitt it was everything or almost everything. From his ancestors, most probably the Governor, who, we infer, was a free liver in a tropical climate, he derived the curse of gout. From the same progenitor he inherited a nervous, violent temperament, and some taint of madness. All this told partly for him, partly against him. The gout drove him to study and reflection, but it constantly disabled him. His temperament roused him to great heights of energy and passion both in eloquence and politics, but it also alienated his fellow-men, and made him sometimes eccentric, and sometimes turbulent. We cannot in such a matter hold the balance. What is genius? None can tell. But may it not be the result in character of the conflict of violent strains of heredity, which clash like flint and steel, and produce the divine spark?
This takes us beyond our limits, more especially those of time; for within those limits the genius of Pitt has only been displayed in the barren gift of eloquence. But when weconsider his disabilities of heredity and of accident we deem him already heroic. Everything has been against him. He has contended against poverty and disease and contempt. He has been wounded in the house of his family. He has been constantly betrayed. He has had to suffer for long years in silence. He is forty-eight when he at last attains anything like power. From this point of view his career is pathetic. It seems such a waste of time and opportunity. But through these long impatient years he was being trained, hardened, one may almost say, baked in the furnace. In silence and bitterness the force was being accumulated that was to electrify the Empire.
Still the dazzling result must not blind us to the facts as they stand at the moment when we are surveying and taking leave of them. Much in a man's life obviously depends on life: much too depends on death. 'Felix opportunitate mortis' is a pregnant saying. How many village Hampdens, how many Miltons have passed away, inglorious because mute, and mute from premature death. Had Cæsar or Marlborough died before middle age their military reputation would have been slender indeed. For how many men, on the other hand, has death come too late. What would have been the place in history of Napoleon III., had Orsini been a successful assassin? What that of Tiberius, had he died at sixty? The authors who have survived themselves are as the sands of the sea; indeed the exceptions are those who have not. The politicians in the same case are less conspicuous, for they crumble into the House of Lords. Historians and rhetoricians have vied with each other in setting forth the glories of Pitt's supreme years. What we have to consider is his position in 1756, when we part fromhim in professed ignorance of what is to come. How would Pitt appear to us had he died when he was still forty-seven? He was forty-eight the day before Devonshire, in his name, assumed the government. That is a respectable age. The younger Pitt never reached it, though he had been Prime Minister for near a score of years. Napoleon closed his career at forty-six. It is needless to detail examples. But at forty-seven the elder Pitt could only claim that he had been Paymaster of the Forces, and had cowed but not persuaded the House of Commons by his oratory. He had, too, the faith of the people, unearned except by vague echoes of purity and eloquence. Otherwise his career had been much like other careers, denouncing, or coquetting and even pressing for office, equable in expectation, and vindictive if refused. Pride was his besetting sin; yet he had stooped, to conquer.
All seems to depend on this point, so difficult to decide: was there patriotism in all this alloy? Was the anxiety for office the mere craving of the politician for reward, or was it the real consciousness of capacity, purity, and inspiration? It may well in earlier days have been the more vulgar ambition, vulgar but not reprehensible; for office is the legitimate end and object of the public man; and Pitt had earned it a hundred times over by ordinary standards, while compelled to stand aside and see his inferiors promoted. But at the period which we have reached we think the nobler sentiment is unmistakable. He will not hold out a finger, he spurns all assistance, he builds without any foundation but himself. Had he wished only for the snug and secure possession of office he would have welcomed the co-operation of Newcastle andFox, invaluable allies in their different ways. But at this time he will have none of them, he dreams of a government which free from taint or suspicion shall appeal for the confidence of the country on the highest and purest grounds.
Here we feel, and feel with relief, that we can give a clear verdict. The rest matters little. The path of the statesman rarely skirts the heights, it is rough, rugged, sometimes squalid, as are most of the roads of life. We are apt to make idols, to ignore shadows, and to fancy that we see stars; not too apt, for it is an illuminating worship. But, that being so, let not those who have to scrutinise therefore condemn. All careers have their blots. The best and happiest are those in which the blemishes are obscured by high achievement. That was supremely the case with Pitt. His upward ascent was much like other ascents, neither better nor worse. But when he reached the summit, and acted in full light and freedom, his triumph was so complete that none deem it worth while to scan his previous record. None should care now, were it not a healthy propensity to seek to know as much as possible of the lives of great men. It is preposterous to depict Pitt as an angel of light. But yet, judged by the standard of his day, the only proper standard to apply, and indeed by the standard of any day, he must be held even in his darkest hours not to have compromised his historical future.
Whatever his failings may have been, his countrymen have refused, and rightly refused, to take heed of them. They have refused to see anything but the supreme orator, the triumphant Minister of 1757-1761, the champion of liberty in later years at home and in the West.With Pitt, as with Nelson, his country will not count flaws. What do they matter? How are they visible in the sunlight of achievement? A country must cherish and guard its heroes.
We have climbed with him in his path to power. We have seen him petulant, factious, hungry, bitter. And yet all the time we have felt that there was always something in him different in quality from his fellow-politicians when they aired the same qualities, that there was an imprisoned spirit within him struggling for freedom and scope. At last it bursts its trammels, he tosses patronage and intrigue to the old political Shylocks, and inspires the policy of the world. Vanity of vanities! Twenty years after his epoch of glory, three years after his death, Britain has reached the lowest point in her history. But still she is the richer for his life. He bequeaths a tradition, he bequeaths a son; and when men think of duty and achievement they look to one or the other. It will be an ill day for their country when either is forgotten.