Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

Back, therefore, to England and two years more of garrison duty there. Quartered in the high-perched keep of Dover where "the winds rattle pretty loud" and cut off from the world without, as he says, by the absence of newspapers or coffee houses, he employs the tedious hours in reading while his officers waste them in piquet. The ladies in the town below complain through Miss Brett to Mrs. Wolfe of the unsociality of the garrison. "Tell Nannie Brett's ladies," Wolfe replies, "that if they lived as loftily and as much in the clouds as we do, their appetites for dancing or anything else would not be so keen. If we dress, the wind disorders our curls; if we walk, we are in danger of our legs; if we ride, of our necks." Afterwards, however, he takes to dancing to please the ladies and apparently grows fond of it.

Among the High Tories of Devonshire he has to do a little more of the work of pacification in which he had been employed in the Highlands. "We are upon such terms with the people in general that I have been forced to put on all my address, and employ my best skill to conciliate matters. It begins to work a little favourably, but not certainly, because the perverseness of these folks, built upon their disaffection, makes the task very difficult. We had a little ball last night, to celebrate His Majesty's birthday—purely military; that is the men were all officers except one. The female branches of the Tory families came readily enough, but not one man would accept the invitation because it was the King's birthday. If it had not fallen in my way to see such an instance of folly I should not readily be brought to conceive it." He has once more to sully a soldier's sword by undertaking police duty against the poor Gloucestershire weavers, who are on strike, and, as he judges, not without good cause. "This expedition carries me a little out of my road and a little in the dirt…. I hope it will turn out a good recruiting party, for the people are so oppressed, so poor and so wretched, that they will perhaps hazard a knock on the pate for bread and clothes and turn soldiers through sheer necessity."

Chatham and glory are now at hand; and the hero is ready for the hour— Sed mors atra caput nigra, circumvolat umbra. "Folks are surprised to see the meagre, decaying, consumptive figure of the son, when the father and mother preserve such good looks; and people are not easily persuaded that I am one of the family. The campaigns of 1743, '4, '5, '6, and '7 stripped me of my bloom, and the winters in Scotland and at Dover have brought me almost to old age and infirmity, and this without any remarkable intemperance. A few years more or less are of very little consequence to the common run of men, and therefore I need not lament that I am perhaps somewhat nearer my end than others of my time. I think and write upon these points without being at all moved. It is not the vapours, but a desire I have to be familiar with those ideas which frighten and terrify the half of mankind that makes me speak upon the subject of my dissolution."

The biographer aptly compares Wolfe to Nelson. Both were frail in body, aspiring in soul, sensitive, liable to fits of despondency, sustained against all weaknesses by an ardent zeal for the public service, and gifted with the same quick eye and the same intuitive powers of command. But it is also a just remark that there was more in Nelson of the love of glory, more in Wolfe of the love of duty. "It is no time to think of what is convenient or agreeable; that service is certainly the best in which we are the most useful. For my part I am determined never to give myself a moment's concern about the nature of the duty which His Majesty is pleased to order us upon; and whether it is by sea or by land that we are to act in obedience to his commands, I hope that we shall conduct ourselves so as to deserve his approbation. It will be sufficient comfort to you, too, as far as my person is concerned, at least it will be a reasonable consolation, to reflect that the Power which has hitherto preserved me may, if it be his pleasure, continue to do so; if not, that it is but a few days or a few years more or less, and that those who perish in their duty and in the service of their country die honourably. I hope I shall have resolution and firmness enough to meet every appearance of danger without great concern, and not be over solicitous about the event." "I have this day signified to Mr. Pitt that he may dispose of my slight carcass as he pleases, and that I am ready for any undertaking within the reach and compass of my skill and cunning. I am in a very bad condition both with the gravel and rheumatism; but I had much rather die than decline any kind of service that offers itself: if I followed my own taste it would lead me into Germany, and if my poor talent was consulted they should place me in the cavalry, because nature has given me good eyes and a warmth of temper to follow the first impressions. However, it is not our part to choose but to obey."

All know that the way in which Mr. Pitt pleased to dispose of the "slight carcass" was by sending it to Rochefort, Louisburg, Quebec. Montcalm, when he found himself dying, shut himself up with his Confessor and the Bishop of Quebec, and to those who came to him for orders said "I have business that must be attended to of greater moment than your ruined garrison and this wretched country." Wolfe's last words were, "Tell Colonel Baxter to march Webb's regiment down to Charles River, to cut off their retreat from the Bridge. Now, God be praised, I will die in peace."

FALKLAND AND THE PURITANS

[Footnote: Published in the Contemporary Review as a reply to Mr.
Matthew Arnold's Essay on Falkland.]

We have the most unfeigned respect for the memory of Falkland. Carlyle's sneer at him has always seemed to us about the most painful thing in the writings of Carlyle. Our knowledge of his public life is meagre, and is derived mainly from a writer under whose personal influence he acted, who is specially responsible for the most questionable step that he took, and on whose veracity, with regard to this portion of the history not much reliance can be placed. But we cannot doubt his title to our admiration and our love. Of his character as a friend, as a host, and as the centre of a literary circle, we have a picture almost peerless in social history. He seems to have presented in a very attractive form the combination—rare now, though not rare in that age, especially among the great Puritan chiefs—of practical activity and military valour with high culture and a serious interest in great questions. Of his fine feelings as a man of honour we have more than one proof. We have proof equally strong of his self-sacrificing devotion to his country; though in this he stood not alone: with his blood on the field of Newbury mingled that of many an English yeoman, whose cheeks were as wet when he left his Puritan home to die for the religion and liberties of England as were those of Lord Falkland when he left the "lime-trees and violets" of Great Tew.

Of political moderation, if it means merely steering a middle course between two extremes, the praise is cheap, and would be shared by Falkland with many weak and with many dishonest men. It may, without disparagement, be remarked of him that his rank as a nobleman was almost sufficient in itself, without any special soundness of understanding or calmness of temperament, to prevent him from throwing himself headlong either into an absolutist reaction which was identified with the ascendency of upstart favourites, and contemners of the old nobility, or into a popular revolution which soon disclosed its tendency to come into collision with the privileged order, and which ended its parricidal career by leaving England, during some of the most glorious years of her history, destitute of a House of Lords. But as an adherent, and no doubt a deliberate adherent, of Constitutional Monarchy, Falkland was in that which in the upshot proved to be the right line of English progress, though by no means the right line of progress for the whole world. The Commonwealth is the ideal of America, where it is practicable, and it alone. Constitutional Monarchy, as Falkland rightly judged, was the highest attainable ideal for England, at any rate in that day. Of attaining that ideal, of doing anything considerable towards its attainment, or towards its defence against the powers of absolutist reaction whose triumph would have rendered its attainment for ever impossible, he was no more capable than he was of performing the labours of Hercules.

In this he bears some resemblance to a man of incomparably greater intellect than his. The fame of Bacon as a philosopher has eclipsed his importance as a politician. But his ideal of an enlightened monarchy, invested with plenary power, but always using its power in conformity with law, and having a Verulam at its right hand, not only is grand and worthy of the majestic intelligence from which it sprang, but is entitled to a good deal of sympathy, when we consider how wanting in enlightenment, how rough, how uncertain, how provoking to a trained and instructed statesman the action of parliaments composed of country gentlemen and meeting at long intervals, in an age when there were no political newspapers or other general organs of political information, could not fail sometimes to be. But Bacon, hampered by enfeebling selfishness, as Falkland was by more generous defects, was incapable of taking a single step toward the realization of his august vision, and the result was, a miserable fall from the ethereal height to the feet of a Somerset and a Buckingham.