In estimating the character of public men, the biographer or critic, if he descend from the sublimity of unbounded panegyric, is often apt to elevate himself at the expense of the person of whom he speaks; and to treat with artificial severity any dereliction from that perfection of conduct which he sees nowhere attained. Thanks to this affected severity or paltry envy, we have hardly a great man left to us. Bolingbroke is nothing but a quack; the elder Pitt only a charlatan; Burke himself a declaimer and a renegade; Fox an ambitious politician out of place; all of which things these great men to a certain degree were, being still great men; and deserving the admiration of a posterity which can hardly hope to furnish their equals.
“No one should write history,” said Montaigne, “who has not himself served the State in some civil or military capacity.” By which this shrewd and impartial observer meant, that no man is fit to judge the conduct of men of action who is not himself a man of action, and can judge it practically, according to what men really are in the world, and not according to any imaginary theory which he may adopt in the obscure nook of his own chimney corner, as to what they might and ought to be.
“We are not,” says Cicero, “in the Republic of Plato, but in the mud of Romulus;” and they who have observed and meditated upon the vicissitudes of empires, will have seen that such have risen or fallen according to the number of eminent men, endowed with lofty intelligences and daring spirits, whom they have produced. And where have such eminent men existed without defects? Human nature is too imperfect for us to expect to find extraordinary abilities and energies under the constant control of moderate virtues.
To those, then, who have read the preceding pages, the whole of Mr. Canning’s career may be shortly summed up in the words of Lord Orford (Horace Walpole), who, speaking of Lord Chatham, says:
“His ambition was to be the most illustrious man in the first country in the world, and he thought that the eminence of glory could not be sullied by the steps to it being passed irregularly” (vol. iv. p. 243).
In the same manner Canning was less scrupulous than he should have been to obtain power and fame. But, in the most memorable part of his life, he made a noble use of the one and well deserved the other. Desirous of office and distinction, he attached himself, on entering life, to that minister by whom office and distinction were most likely to be conferred. The circumstances of the time afforded him not merely an apology, but a fair reason for doing this; still, there seems no injustice in adding that, in ranging himself under the banner of the great commoner’s great son, he thought of his own personal prospects as well as of the public interests.
Mr. Pitt died; Mr. Canning was, as he declared himself, henceforth without a leader. Some of his opinions inclined him to unite with his early friends and recent opponents (the Whigs), who then came into office; and this, it seems, he was on the point of doing, when, by a sudden whirl of Fortune’s wheel, the persons he was seceding from were jerked into power, and those he was about to join jerked out of it. A young man, conscious of his own abilities, and satisfied in his own mind that, however he might obtain influence, he would use it for the public advantage, he did not refuse a high situation from the party to which he still publicly belonged, in order to follow a party just driven from the Administration, and with which he had but begun to treat.
There are things to say in excuse of this conduct, and I have said them; but no one who wishes that Mr. Canning’s life had been without a flaw, can do otherwise than regret that the statesman who made so many subsequent sacrifices for the Catholics, should have joined, at this juncture, a Ministry which rallied its partisans under the cry of “No Popery!”
It is likewise to be regretted that having so frequently expressed his sense of the incapacity of Lord Castlereagh, he should nevertheless have consented first to serve as a subordinate under him when he was mismanaging foreign affairs; and, secondly, to serve as a colleague with him when he was alike lowering us abroad and misgoverning us at home.