Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

Wolfe, it must be owned, does not write well. He has reason to envy, as he does, the grace of the female style. He is not only ungrammatical, which, in a familiar letter, is a matter of very small consequence, but somewhat stilted. Perhaps it was like the "Madam," the fashion of the Johnsonian era. Yet beneath the buckram you always feel that there is a heart. Persons even of the same profession are cast in very different moulds; and the mould of Wolfe was as different as possible from that of the Iron Duke.

Wolfe's dreary garrison leisures in Scotland, however, were not idle. His books go with him, and he is doing his best to cultivate himself, both professionally and generally. He afterwards recommends to a friend, evidently from his own experience, a long list of military histories and other works ancient and modern. The ancients he read in translations. His range is wide and he appreciates military genius in all its forms. "There is an abundance of military knowledge to be picked out of the lives of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII., King of Sweden, and of Zisca the Bohemian, and if a tolerable account could be got of the exploits of Scanderbeg, it would be inestimable, for he excels all the officers ancient and modern in the conduct of a small defensive army." At Louisburg, Wolfe put in practice, with good effect, a manoeuvre which he had learned from the Carduchi in Xenophon, showing perhaps by this reproduction of the tactics employed two thousand years before by a barbarous tribe, that in the so-called art of war there is a large element which is not progressive. Books will never make a soldier, but Wolfe, as a military student, had the advantage of actual experience of war. Whenever he could find a teacher, he studied mathematics, zealously though apparently not with delight. "I have read the mathematics till I am grown perfectly stupid, and have algebraically worked away the little portion of understanding that was allowed to me. They have not even left me the qualities of a coxcomb for I can neither laugh nor sing nor talk an hour upon nothing. The latter of these is a sensible loss, for it excludes a gentleman from all good company and makes him entirely unfit for the conversation of the polite world." "I don't know how the mathematics may assist the judgment, but they have a great tendency to make men dull. I who am far from being sprightly even in my gaiety, am the very reverse of it at this time." Certainly to produce sprightliness is neither the aim nor the general effect of mathematics. That while military education was carried on, general culture was not wholly neglected, is proved by the famous exclamation about Gray's Elegy, the most signal homage perhaps that a poet ever received. At Glasgow, where there is a University, Wolfe studies mathematics in the morning, in the afternoon he endeavours to regain his lost Latin.

Nor in training himself did he neglect to train his soldiers. He had marked with bitterness of heart the murderous consequence to which neglect of training had led in the beginning of every war. Probably he had the army of Frederick before his eyes. His words on musketry practice may still have an interest. "Marksmen are nowhere so necessary as in a mountainous country; besides, firing at objects teaches the soldiers to level incomparably, makes the recruit steady, and removes the foolish apprehension that seizes young soldiers when they first load their arms with bullets. We fire, first singly, then by files, one, two, three, or more, then by ranks, and lastly by platoons; and the soldiers see the effects of their shots, especially at a mark or upon water. We shoot obliquely and in different situations of ground, from heights downwards and contrariwise."

Military education and attention to the details of the profession were not very common under the Duke of Wellington. They were still less common under the Duke of Cumberland. Before he was thirty, Wolfe was a great military authority, and what was required of Chatham, in his case, was not so much the eye to discern latent merit, as the boldness to promote merit over the head of rank.

In a passage just quoted Wolfe expresses his fear lest command should make him tyrannical. He was early tried by the temptation of power. He became Lieut.-Colonel at twenty-five; but in the absence of his Colonel he had already been in command at Stirling when he was only twenty- three. This was in quarters where he was practically despotic. He does not fail in his letters to pour out his heart on his situation. "Tomorrow Lord George Sackville goes away, and I take upon me the difficult and troublesome employment of a commander. You can't conceive how difficult a thing it is to keep the passions within bounds, when authority and immaturity go together: to endeavour at a character which has every opposition from within, and that the very condition of the blood is a sufficient obstacle to. Fancy you see me that must do justice to good and bad; reward and punish with an equal unbiassed hand; one that is to reconcile the severity of discipline with the dictates of humanity, one that must study the tempers and dispositions of many men, in order to make their situation easy and agreeable to them, and should endeavour to oblige all without partiality; a mark set up for everybody to observe and judge of; and last of all, suppose one employed in discouraging vice, and recommending the reverse, at the turbulent age of twenty-three, when it is possible I may have as great a propensity that way as any of the men that I converse with." He had difficulties of character to contend with, as well as difficulties of age. His temper was quick; he knew it. "My temper is much too warm, and sudden resentment forces out expressions and even actions that are neither justifiable nor excusable, and perhaps I do not conceal the natural heat so much as I ought to do." He even felt that he was apt to misconstrue the intentions of those around him, and to cherish groundless prejudices. "I have that wicked disposition of mind that whenever I know that people have entertained a very ill opinion, I imagine they never change. From whence one passes easily to an indifference about them, and then to dislike, and though I flatter myself that I have the seeds of justice strong enough to keep from doing wrong, even to an enemy, yet there lurks a hidden poison in the heart that it is difficult to root out. It is my misfortune to catch fire on a sudden, to answer letters the moment I receive them, when they touch me sensibly, and to suffer passion to dictate my expressions more than my reason. The next day, perhaps, would have changed this, and earned more moderation with it. Every ill turn of my life has had this haste and first impulse of the moment for its cause, and it proceeds from pride." Solitary command and absence from the tempering influences of general society were, as he keenly felt, likely to aggravate his infirmities. Yet he proves not only a successful but a popular commander, and he seems never to have lost his friends. The "seeds of justice" no doubt were really strong, and the transparent frankness of his character, its freedom from anything like insidiousness or malignity, must have had a powerful effect in dispelling resentment.

His first regimental minute, of which his biographer gives us an abstract, evinces a care for his men which must have been almost startling in the days of "Hangman Hawley." He desires to be acquainted in writing with the men and the companies they belong to, and as soon as possible with their characters, that he may know the proper objects to encourage, and those over whom it will be necessary to keep a strict hand. The officers are enjoined to visit the soldiers' quarters frequently; now and then to go round between nine and eleven o'clock at night, and not trust to sergeants' reports. They are also requested to watch the looks of the privates, and observe whether any of them were paler than usual, that the reason might be inquired into and proper means used to restore them to their former vigour. Subalterns are told that "a young officer should not think he does too much." But firmness, and great firmness, must have been required, as well as watchfulness and kindness. His confidential expressions with regard to the state of the army are as strong as words can make them. "I have a very mean opinion of the Infantry in general. I know their discipline to be bad and their valour precarious. They are easily put into disorder and hard to recover out of it. They frequently kill their officers in their fear and murder one another in their confusion." "Nothing, I think, can hurt their discipline—it is at its worst. They shall drink and swear, plunder and murder, with any troops in Europe, the Cossacks and Calmucks themselves not excepted." "If I stay much longer with the regiment I shall be perfectly corrupt; the officers are loose and profligate and the soldiers are very devils." He brought the 67th, however, into such a condition that it remained a model regiment for years after he was gone.

Nor were the duties of a commanding officer in Scotland at that period merely military. In the Highlands especially, he was employed in quenching the smoking embers of rebellion, and in re-organizing the country after the anarchy of civil war. Disarming had to be done, and suppression of the Highland costume, which now marks the Queen's favourite regiment, but then marked a rebel. This is bad, as well as unworthy, work for soldiers, who have not the trained self-command which belongs to a good police, and for which the Irish Constabulary are as remarkable as they are for courage and vigour. Even Wolfe's sentiments contracted a tinge of cruelty from his occupation. In one of his subsequent letters he avows a design which would have led to the massacre of a whole clan. "Would you believe that I am so bloody?" We do not believe that he was so bloody, and are confident that the design, if it was ever really formed, would not have been carried into effect. But the passage is the most painful one in his letters. The net result of his military administration, however, was that the people at Inverness were willing to celebrate the Duke of Cumberland's birthday, though they were not willing to comply with the insolent demand of Colonel Lord Bury, who had come down to take the command for a short time, that they should celebrate it on the anniversary of Culloden. It is a highly probable tradition that the formation of Highland regiments was suggested by Wolfe.

In a passage which we have quoted Wolfe glances at the awkward and perilous position in which a young commander was placed in having to control the moral habits of officers his equals in age, and to rebuke the passions which mutinied in his own blood. He could hardly be expected to keep himself immaculate. But he is always struggling to do right and repentant when he does wrong. "We use a very dangerous freedom and looseness of speech among ourselves; this by degrees makes wickedness and debauchery less odious than it should be, if not familiar, and sets truth, religion, and virtue at a great distance. I hear things every day said that would shock your ears, and often say things myself that are not fit to be repeated, perhaps without any ill intention, but merely by the force of custom. The best that can be offered in our defence is that some of us see the evil and wish to avoid it." Among the very early letters there is one to his brother about "pretty mantua makers," etc, but it is evidently nothing but a nominal deference to the military immorality of the age. Once when on a short visit to London, and away from the restraining responsibilities of his command, Wolfe, according to his own account, lapsed into debauchery. "In that short time I committed more imprudent acts than in all my life before I lived in the idlest, [most] dissolute, abandoned manner that could be conceived, and that not out of vice, which is the most extraordinary part of it. I have escaped at length and am once more master of my reason, and hereafter it shall rule my conduct; at least I hope so." Perhaps the lapse may have been worse by contrast than in itself. The intensity of pure affection which pervades all Wolfe's letters is sufficient proof that he had never abandoned himself to sensuality to an extent sufficient to corrupt his heart. The age was profoundly sceptical, and if the scepticism had not spread to the army the scoffing had. Wolfe more than once talks lightly of going to church as a polite form; but he appears always to have a practical belief in God.

It is worthy of remark that a plunge into London dissipation follows very close upon the disappointment of an honourable passion. Wolfe had a certain turn of mind which favoured matrimony "prodigiously," and he had fallen very much in love with Miss Lawson, Maid of Honour to the Princess of Wales. But the old General and Mrs. Wolfe opposed the match —apparently on pecuniary grounds. "They have their eye upon one of L30,000." Miss Lawson had only L12,000. Parents had more authority then than they have now, Wolfe was exceedingly dutiful, and he allowed the old people, on whom, from the insufficiency of his pay, he was still partly dependent, to break off the affair. Such at least seems to have been the history of its termination. The way in which Wolfe records the catastrophe, it must be owned, is not very romantic. "This last disappointment in love has changed my natural disposition to such a degree that I believe it is now possible that I might prevail upon myself not to refuse twenty or thirty thousand pounds, if properly offered. Rage and despair do not commonly produce such reasonable effects; nor are they the instruments to make a man's fortune by but in particular cases." It was long, however, before he could think of Miss Lawson without a pang, and the sight of her portrait, he tells us, takes away his appetite for some days.

At seven and twenty Wolfe left Scotland, having already to seven years' experience of warfare added five years' experience of difficult command. He is now able to move about a little and open his mind, which has been long cramped by confinement in Highland quarters. He visits an old uncle in Ireland, and, as one of the victors of Culloden, views with special interest that field of the Boyne, where in the last generation Liberty and Progress had triumphed over the House of Stuart. "I had more satisfaction in looking at this spot than in all the variety that I have met with; and perhaps there is not another piece of ground in the world that I could take so much pleasure to observe." Then, though with difficulty, he obtained the leave of the pipe-clay Duke to go to Paris. There he saw the hollow grandeur of the decaying monarchy and the immoral glories of Pompadour. "I was yesterday at Versailles, a cold spectator of what we commonly call splendour and magnificence. A multitude of men and women were assembled to bow and pay their compliments in the most submissive manner to a creature of their own species." He went into the great world, to which he gains admission with an ease which shows that he has a good position, and tries to make up his leeway in the graces by learning to fence, dance, and ride. He wishes to extend his tour and see the European armies; but the Duke inexorably calls him back to pipe-clay. It is proposed to him that he should undertake the tutorship of the young Duke of Richmond on a military tour through the Low Countries. But he declines the offer. "I don't think myself quite equal to the task, and as for the pension that might follow, it is very certain that it would not become me to accept it. I can't take money from any one but the King, my master, or from some of his blood."