A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

[Sidenote: 1780—The younger Pitt and Brinsley Sheridan]

The year 1780 that witnessed the Gordon riots welcomed into political life two men, both of whom were young, both of whom bore names that were already familiar from an honorable parentage, and both of whom were destined to play very conspicuous parts in the House of Commons. One of the two men was known to his family alone, and his intimates, as a youth of great promise and great knowledge, which gave to his twenty years the ripened wisdom of a statesman and a scholar. The other, who was eight years older, had been for some years in the public eye, had been the hero of a romantic scandal which had done much to make his name notorious, and had written some dramatic works which had done more to make his name famous. It was a fortunate chance that when the House of Commons stood in need of new blood and new men the same time and the same year saw the return to Parliament of William Pitt and of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

It has been said that every reader of the "Iliad" finds himself irresistibly compelled to take sides with one or other of the great opposing camps, and to be thenceforward either a Greek or a Trojan. In something of the same spirit every student of the reign of the third George becomes perforce a partisan of one or other of two statesmen who divided the honors of its prime between them, who were opposed on all the great questions of their day, and who represented at their best the two forces into which English political life was then, and is still, divided. The history of England for the closing years of the eighteenth century and the early dawn of the nineteenth century is {212} the history of these two men and of their influence. Those who study their age and their career are separated as keenly and as hotly to-day as they were separated keenly and hotly a hundred years ago into the followers of Charles James Fox or the followers of William Pitt. The record of English party politics is a record of long and splendid duels between recognized chiefs of the two antagonistic armies. What the struggle between Gladstone and Disraeli, for example, was to our own time, the struggle between Fox and Pitt was to our ancestors of three generations ago. All the force and feeling that made for what we now call liberal principles found its most splendid representative in the son of Lord Holland: all the force and feeling that rallied around the conservative impulse looked for and found its ideal in the son of Lord Chatham. The two men were as much contrasted as the opinions that they professed. To the misgoverned, misguided, splendidly reckless boyhood and early manhood of Fox Pitt opposed the gravity and stillness of his youth. The exuberant animal vitality of Fox, wasting itself overlong in the flame of aimless passions, was emphasized by the solid reserve, the passionless austerity of Pitt. The one man was compact of all the heady enthusiasms, the splendid generosities of a nature rich in the vitality that sought eagerly new outlets for its energy, that played hard as it worked hard, that exulted in extremes. The other moved in a narrow path to one envisaged aim, and, conscious of a certain physical frailty, husbanded his resources, limited the scope of his fine intellect, and acted not indeed along the line of least resistance but within lines of purpose that were not very far apart. The one explored the mountain and the valley, lingered in gardens and orchards, or wandered at all adventure upon desolate heaths; the other pursued in patience the white highway to his goal, untempted or at least unconquered by allurements that could prove irresistible to his adversary.

[Sidenote: 1780—The character of the younger Pitt]

The two men differed as much in appearance as in mind. The outer seeming of each is almost as familiar as the forms and faces of contemporaries. Fox was massively {213} corpulent, furiously untidy, a heroic sloven, his bull throat and cheeks too often black with a three days' beard, infinitely lovable, exquisitely cultured, capable of the noblest tenderness, yet with a kind of grossness sometimes that was but a part, and perhaps an inevitable part, of his wide humanity. Pitt was slender, boyish, precise, punctilious in attire, his native composure only occasionally lightened by a flash of humor or sweetened by a show of playfulness, old beyond his years and young to the end of his short life, sternly self-restrained and self-commanded, gracious in a kind of melancholy, unconscious charm, a curiously unadorned, uncolored personality, that attracted where it did attract with a magnetism that was perhaps all the more potent for being somewhat difficult to explain. Fox was always a lover in many kinds of love, fugitive, venal, illicit, honorable, and enduring. Pitt carried himself through temptations with a monastic rigor. There was a time when his friends implored him for the sake of appearances, and not to flout too flagrantly the manners of the time, to show himself in public with a woman of the town. His one love story, strange and fruitless, neither got nor gave happiness and remains an unsolved mystery.

There were only two tastes held in common by the two men, and those were tastes shared by most of the gentlemen of their generation and century, the taste for politics and the taste for wine. Men of the class of Holland's son, of Chatham's son, if they were not soldiers and sailors, and very often when they were soldiers and sailors, went into political life as naturally as they went into a university or into the hunting field. In the case of the younger Fox and of the younger Pitt the political direction was conspicuously inevitable from the beginning. The paths of both lay plain from the threshold of the nursery to the threshold of St. Stephen's. The lad who was the chosen companion of his father at an age when his contemporaries had only abandoned a horn-book to grapple with Corderius, the boy who learned the principles of elocution and the essence of debate from the lips of the Great Commoner, were children very specially fostered in the arts of {214} statesmanship and curiously favored in the knowledge that enables men to guide and govern men. From the other taste there was no escape, or little escape, possible for the men of that day. It would have been strange indeed if Fox had been absolved from the love of wine, which was held by every one he knew, from his father's old friend and late enemy Rigby to the elderly place-holder, gambler, and letter-writer Selwyn, who loved, slandered, and failed to ruin Fox's brilliant youth. It would have been impossible for Pitt, floated through a precarious childhood on floods of Oporto, to liberate his blood and judgment from the generous liquor that promised him a strength it sapped. It was no more disgrace to the austere Pitt than to the profligate Fox to come to the House of Commons visibly under the influence of much more wine than could possibly have been good for Hercules. Sobriety was not unknown among statesmen even in those days of many bottles, but intoxication was no shame, and Burke was no more commended for his temperance than Fox, or Pitt, or Sheridan were blamed for their intemperance.

[Sidenote: 1759-80—The youth of the younger Pitt]

William Pitt was born in 1759, when George the Second still seemed stable on his throne, and when the world knew nothing of that grandson and heir to whose service the child of Chatham was to be devoted. He was the fourth child and second son; the third son and last child of Chatham was born two years later. William Pitt was delicate from his infancy, and by reason of his delicacy was never sent to school. He was educated by private tuition, directly guided and controlled by his father. From the first he was precocious, full of promise, full of performance. He acquired knowledge eagerly and surely; what he learned he learned well and thoroughly. Trained from his cradle in the acquirements essential to a public life, he applied himself, as soon as he was of an age to appreciate his tastes and to form a purpose, to equipping himself at all points for a political career. When the great Chatham died he left behind him a son who was to be as famous as himself, a statesman formed in his own school, trained in his own methods, inspired by his counsels, and guided by {215} his example. A legend which may be more than legend has it that from the first destiny seemed determined to confront the genius and the fame of Fox with the genius and the fame of Pitt. It is said that the Foxes were assured by a relative of the Pitts that the young son of Chatham, then a child under a tutor's charge, showed parts which were sure to prove him a formidable rival to the precocious youth who was at once the delight and the despair of Lord Holland's life. It is certain that the young Fox was early made acquainted with the ripe intelligence and eager genius of the younger Pitt. It was his chance to stand with the boy one night at the bar of the House of Lords, and to be attracted and amazed at the avidity with which Pitt followed the debate, the sagacity with which he commented upon what he saw and heard, and the readiness with which he formulated answers to arguments which failed to carry conviction to his dawning wisdom. Pitt loved the House of Commons while he was still in the schoolroom; it was inevitable that he should belong to the House of Commons, and he entered it at the earliest possible moment, even before he was legally qualified to do so, for he was not quite of age when he first took his seat.

The qualities of fairness and fitness which Greek wisdom praised in the conduct of life were characteristic of Pitt's life. In its zealous, patient preparation for public life, its noble girding of the loins against great issues, its wistful renunciation of human hopes, its early consciousness of terrible disease, its fortitude in the face of catastrophes so unexpected and so cruel; in its pensive isolation, in the richness of those early successes that seemed as if in anticipation to offer compensation for the early death, his life seems to have been adorned with certain ornaments and ordered by certain laws that make it strangely comely, curiously symmetrical. In that youth of his which was never quite young, and which was never allowed to grow old, in his austere attitude to so much that youth holds most dear, in the high passion of his patriotism with its eager desire, so often and so sternly thwarted, to add to England's glory, he stands apart from {216} many greater and many wiser men, in a melancholy, lonely dignity. It has been given to few men to inspire more passionate attachment in the minds of his contemporaries; it has been given to few statesmen to be regarded abroad, by eyes for the most part envious or hostile, as pre-eminently representative of the qualities that made his country at once disliked and feared. His political instincts were for the most part admirable, and if it had been his fortune to serve a sovereign more reasonable, more temperate, and more intelligent than George the Third his name might have been written among the great reformers of the world. At home an unhappy deference to the dictates of a rash and incapable king, abroad an enforced opposition to one of the greatest forces and one of the greatest conquerors that European civilization has seen, prevented Pitt from gaining that position to which his genius, under conditions less persistently unhappy, would have entitled him. To have gained what he did gain under such conditions was in itself a triumph.

The new-comer who entered Parliament at the same period as William Pitt was as curiously unlike him as even Fox himself. If few knew anything of Pitt every one knew something of Sheridan, who had already made fame in one career and was now about to make fame in another. It may afford consolation to the unappreciated to reflect that the most famous English dramatist since Shakespeare's day, the brightest wit of an age which piqued itself into being considered witty, the most brilliant orator of an age which regarded oratory as one of the greatest of the arts, and whose roll is studded with the names of illustrious orators, the most unrivalled humorist of a century which in all parts of the world distinguished itself by its love of humor, was looked upon in his nonage as a dull, unpromising boy, chiefly remarkable for his idleness and carelessness.