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

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

Of no period of Warren Hastings's life is less known than of the four years which he spent in his native land—from 1765 to 1769. He did not return to England like the traditional Nabob, with pockets overflowing with rupees. He had not employed his time and his energies, as so many other servants of John Company had done, solely to the furthering of his own fortunes, and the filling of his own pockets. If he had sailed for India fourteen years earlier as a penniless lad, he returned to England comparatively a poor man. He had tried his hand at commerce like every one else in India, but commerce was not much in his line. He had the capacities of a statesman, he had the tastes of a man of letters, but he did not in any great degree possess the qualities that go to make a successful merchant. It is even said that he had to borrow the money to pay his passage home, and it seems certain that when he was home, the generous way in which he endeavored to assist his relations sorely taxed his meagre means.

Hastings seems to have sought for distinction in the career of a man of letters and not to have found it. The ability which he displayed in administration and the writing of State papers and political correspondence vanished whenever he attempted to produce work that made a more ambitious claim to be considered literature. The clearness of statement, the width of view, the logical form, the firm grasp and profound knowledge which were characteristic of the evidence he gave before the House of {254} Commons Committee in 1766, gave place to a thin and niggling pedantry of style when he turned his pen to the essays and the verses of a man of letters. Yet there were some topics on which he was eminently qualified to write, and by which, under happier conditions, he might have earned distinction. While he was in India he had not allowed his active mind to be entirely occupied with the duties of his official career. That love of literature, that marvellous capacity for acquiring knowledge, which had characterized him in his Westminster school-days, remained with him at the desk of the East India Company and in the courts of Indian princes. He gave great attention to the languages and the literatures of the East. Most of those English who served their term in India contented themselves, when they troubled themselves at all about the matter, with learning as much of the native vernaculars with which they were brought into contact as was necessary for the carrying on of a conversation and the giving of an order. With such a measure of knowledge Warren Hastings was not content. He studied Persian, the courtly language of India, closely; he read much in its enchanting literature. When he came back to England in 1765 he was possessed of a knowledge of the most beautiful of the Eastern languages, as rare as it was useless then for an English man of letters to possess.

[Sidenote: 1769—Warren Hastings as an Oriental scholar]

Almost a century later the great American transcendentalist, Emerson, prophesied a rise of Orientalism in England, and he lived to see his words come true. But in the days when Warren Hastings was striving to make his way in London as an author, the influence of the East upon literature, upon scholarship, upon thought, was scarcely perceptible. People read indeed the "Arabian Nights" in M. Galland's delightful version; read the Persian tales of Petit de la Croix; read all the translations of the many sham Oriental tales which the popularity of Galland and Petit de la Croix had called for in Paris, and which the Parisian writers were ready to supply. But serious Oriental scholarship can hardly be said to have existed in England. Sir William Jones was the only Englishman of {255} distinction who was earnestly devoted to Eastern studies; but his Persian Grammar, which was in some degree the foundation-stone of Persian scholarship in England, had not yet appeared, and Sir William Jones was still writing to Reviczki those delightful letters in which he raves about the poetry of the Arabs and the Persians. Thus the scholarship of Warren Hastings placed him in an exceedingly small minority among Englishmen of letters. Hastings was not the man to be alarmed or discouraged by finding himself in a minority. He was as impassioned an admirer of Persian poetry as Sir William Jones; he considered that the Persian language should be included in the studies of all well-educated men; he dreamed of animating the waning fires of Oriental learning at Oxford. He had a vision in his mind of a new scholarship, to be called into being by the generosity of the East India Company. He thought of Englishmen becoming as familiar with the deeds of Rustum as with the wrath of Achilles, as intimate with the Ghazels of Hafiz as with the Odes of Horace. He seems to have visited Dr. Johnson in the hope of securing him as an ally in his scheme. The scheme came to nothing, but the learning, the literary taste, and scholarly ambition of Hastings made a strong impression upon Johnson, who entertained a stately regard for the young man from India.

It soon became plain to Warren Hastings that he was not going to make much of a livelihood either by Persian poetry or by the calling of a man of letters. His thoughts had turned back to India within a year of his return to England, and he had applied for employment to the Company, but for some reason his request was not granted. In 1768, however, the Court of Directors appointed him to a seat in Council at Madras, and early in the following year, 1769, he sailed again for India on his most momentous voyage. Not only was that ship, the "Duke of Grafton," bearing him to a career of the greatest glory and the greatest obloquy; not only was it carrying him to a grandeur and a fall almost unparalleled in the history of men who were not monarchs. On board the "Duke of {256} Grafton" Warren Hastings was to meet with one of the most serious influences of his life. We have already seen how Hastings had married, had been a father, and how wife and children had passed out of his life and left him alone. Hastings was a man of strong emotions. Now he met a woman who awoke all the strongest emotions of his nature and won his devotion for the rest of his life. The Baroness von Imhoff was a young, beautiful, attractive woman, married to a knavish adventurer.

It is certain that she and Hastings felt a warm attachment for each other; it seems certain that Imhoff connived at, or at least winked at, the attachment. It may be that the understanding between Hastings and Imhoff was in this sense honorable—that the Baron was willing to free his wife from an unhappy union that she might form a happy union. It may be that Hastings's passion was indeed, in Macaulay's fine phrase, "patient of delay." The simple facts that call for no controversy are that Hastings met the Baroness von Imhoff in 1769; that eight years later, in 1777, Imhoff, with the aid of Hastings's money, obtained his divorce in the Franconian Courts, and that the woman who had been his wife became the wife of Hastings. She made him a devoted wife; he made her a devoted husband. Hastings was never a profligate. In an age that was not remarkable for morality his life was apparently moral even to austerity. His relationships with the Imhoffs constitute the only charge of immorality that has been brought against him, and the charge, at least, is not of the gravest kind. If Anglo-Indian society was at first inclined to be uncharitable, if the great ladies of its little world held aloof in the beginning from the Baroness von Imhoff, her marriage with Hastings seems to have restored her to general favor and esteem.

[Sidenote: 1771—Hastings's great administrative qualities]

Warren Hastings found plenty of work cut out for him on his return to India. He had his own ideas, and strong ideas, about the necessity for reforms. He was much opposed to the policy of sending out as secretaries to the local governments men who were without local experience and therefore less likely to take a warm interest {257} in the Company's welfare, while such appointments were in themselves unjust to the claims of the Company's own servants. He vehemently urged the necessity for making the rewards of the service more adequate to the duties of the service, and he announced himself as determined to do all he could for "the improvement of the Company's finances, so far as it can be effected without encroaching upon their future income." If Hastings could scheme out needed reforms on his way out, he found on his arrival that the need for reform was little short of appalling. The position which Hastings held was a curious one. He was President of the Council, it is true, but president of a council of which every member had an equal vote, and many of the members of which had personal reasons for wishing to oppose the reforms that Hastings was coming out to accomplish. A disorganized government had to be reorganized, an exhausted exchequer to be refilled, a heart-breaking debt to be reduced, and all this had to be done under conditions that well might have shaken a less dauntless spirit than that of Warren Hastings.

Warren Hastings was never for one moment shaken. In a very short space of time he had greatly bettered the administrative system, had fostered the trade of the country by the adoption of a uniform and low Customs duty, and had greatly furthered the establishment of civilized rule in the province conquered by Clive. He accomplished this in the face of difficulties and all dissensions in his own Council, against subtle native intrigues, against opposition open and covert of the most persistent kind. Every creature who throve out of the disorganization of India naturally worked, in the daylight or in the dark, against Hastings's efforts at organization. In 1771, when he was made Governor of Bengal, he had attempted much and succeeded in much. He fought hard with the secret terror of dacoity. Having given Bengal a judicial system, he proceeded to increase its usefulness by drawing up a code of Mohammedan and Hindu law. For the former he used the digest made by command of Aurungzebe; for the {258} second he employed ten learned Pundits, the result of whose labors was afterwards translated into English by Halhed, who had been the friend of Sheridan and his rival for the hand of Miss Linley.

The work which Warren Hastings accomplished in India must be called gigantic. He created organization out of chaos; he marched straightforward upon the course which Clive had already marked out as the path of the East India Company's glory. The East India Company was not very eager to advance along that path. Hastings spurred its sluggish spirit, and, though he was not able to do all that his daring nature dreamed of, he left behind him a long record of great achievements. The annexation of Benares, the practical subjection of Oude, the extension of British dominion, the triumphs of British arms, must be remembered to the credit of Warren Hastings when his career as a great English adventurer is being summed up. That British Empire in India for which Clive unconsciously labored owes its existence to-day in no small degree to the genius, to the patience, and to the untiring energy of Warren Hastings.