Lord Chatham, His Early Life and Connections

by Earl of Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery

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 with such 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 afterwards more 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 arrangement so 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 there will 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 disperses still 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, that in 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 nothing written. 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 such energy 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, thinks that 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.