Great leaders: Historic portraits from the great historians

by Unknown

His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which flashed from the small, thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House of Commons far greater than any other minister has possessed. He could silence an opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the whole House with a single word. But he never stooped to the arts by which men form a political party, and at the height of his power his personal following hardly numbered half a dozen members.

His real strength, indeed, lay not in Parliament, but in the people at large. His significant title of “the great commoner” marks a political revolution. “It is the people who have sent me here,” Pitt boasted with a haughty pride when the nobles of the cabinet opposed his will. He was the first to see that the long political inactivity of the public mind had ceased, and that the progress of commerce and industry had produced a great middle class which no longer found its representatives in the legislature. “You have taught me,” said George II, when Pitt sought to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, “to look for the voice of my people in other places than within the House of Commons.”

It was this unrepresented class which had forced him into power. During his struggle with Newcastle the greater towns backed him with the gift of their freedom and addresses of confidence. “For weeks,” laughs Horace Walpole, “it rained gold boxes.” London stood by him through good report and evil report, and the wealthiest of English merchants, Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political lieutenant. The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with its energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural attraction to the one statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish, whose hands were clean, whose life was pure and full of tender affection for wife and child. But there was a far deeper ground for their enthusiastic reverence and for the reverence which his country has borne Pitt ever since.

He loved England with an intense and personal love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs, her defeats his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought of self or party spirit. “Be one people,” he cried to the factions who rose to bring about his fall; “forget everything but the public! I set you the example!” His glowing patriotism was the real spell by which he held England. But even the faults which checkered his character told for him with the middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and absence of pretense. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the cabinet, in the House, in his very office. He transacted business with his clerks in full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was, are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing into the House of Commons “the gestures and emotions of the stage.” But the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman who was borne into the lobby amid the tortures of the gout, or carried into the House of Lords to breathe his last in a protest against national dishonor.

Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. The power of political speech had been revealed in the stormy debates of the long Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance by the legal and theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung off by the age of the revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression, precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole, no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were always his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect, his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the front. That with defects like these he stood far above every orator of his time was due above all to his profound conviction, to the earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. “I must sit still,” he whispered once to a friend, “for when once I am up everything that is in my mind comes out.” But the reality of his eloquence was transfigured by a large and poetic imagination, and by a glow of passion which not only raised him high above the men of his own day, but set him in the front rank among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, a sympathy with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a command over the whole range of human feeling. He passed without an effort from the most solemn appeal to the gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by the grand self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one having authority. He was in fact the first English orator whose words were a power, a power not over Parliament only, but over the nation at large. Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen’s. But it was especially in these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief passionate appeals, that the power of his eloquence lay. The few broken words we have of him stir the same thrill in men of our day which they stirred in the men of his own. But passionate as was Pitt’s eloquence, it was the eloquence of a statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all his greater struggles, his defense of the liberty of the subject against arbitrary imprisonment under “general warrants,” of the liberty of the press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of constituencies against the House of Commons, of the constitutional rights of America against England itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preservation of Prussia, and Prussia has vindicated his foresight by the creation of Germany. We have adopted his plans for the direct government of India by the crown, which when he proposed them were regarded as insane. Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church of England. He was the first to sound the note of parliamentary reform. One of his earliest measures shows the generosity and originality of his mind. He quieted Scotland by employing its Jacobites in the service of their country, and by raising the Highland regiments among its clans. The selection of Wolfe and Amherst as generals showed his contempt for precedent and his inborn knowledge of men.

EDMUND BURKE.
By WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.

[One of the greatest of English statesmen and orators, born in Ireland in 1730, died 1797. He entered Parliament in 1766, and at the beginning of the American troubles at once identified himself with the policy of conciliation and moderation. During his long parliamentary career Burke distinguished himself in connection with every political problem which agitated the British Empire, though he never became prime minister, and was for the most of his life a member of the opposition. Burke’s speech at the trial of Warren Hastings is regarded by many critics as the greatest oration ever delivered in any forum. He was scarcely less distinguished as a writer on political and philosophical questions than as statesman and orator.]

There are few men whose depth and versatility have been both so fully recognized by their contemporaries and whose pre-eminence in many widely different spheres is so amply attested. Adam Smith declared that he had found no other man who, without communication, had thought out the same conclusions on political economy as himself. Winstanley, the Camden Professor of Ancient History, bore witness to his great knowledge of the “philosophy, history, and filiation of languages, and of the principles of etymological deduction.” Arthur Young, the first living authority on agriculture, acknowledged his obligations to him for much information about his special pursuits, and it was in a great degree his passion for agriculture which induced Burke, when the death of his elder brother had improved his circumstances, to incumber himself with a heavy debt by purchasing that Beaconsfield estate where some of his happiest days were spent. His conversational powers were only equaled, and probably not surpassed, by those of Johnson. Goldsmith described him as “winding into his subject, like a serpent.” “Like the fabled object of the fairy’s favors,” said Wilberforce, “whenever he opened his mouth pearls and diamonds dropped from him.” Grattan pronounced him the best talker he had ever known. Johnson, in spite of their violent political differences, always spoke of him with generous admiration. “Burke is an extraordinary man. His stream of mind is perpetual.... His talk is the ebullition of his mind. He does not talk for a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full.... He is the only man whose common conversation corresponds with the general fame which he has in the world. Take up what topic you please, he is ready to meet you.... No man of sense could meet Mr. Burke by accident under a gateway to avoid a shower without being convinced that he was the first man in England.” It is not surprising that “he is the first man in the House of Commons, for he is the first man everywhere.” He once declared that “he knew but two men who had risen considerably above the common standard—Lord Chatham and Edmund Burke.”

The admirable proportion which subsisted between his different powers, both moral and intellectual, is especially remarkable. Genius is often, like the pearl, the offspring or the accompaniment of disease, and an extraordinary development of one class of faculties is too frequently balanced by an extraordinary deficiency of others. But nothing of this kind can be found in Burke.

His intellectual energy was fully commensurate with his knowledge, and he had rare powers of bringing illustrations and methods of reasoning derived from many spheres to bear on any subject he touched, and of combining an extraordinary natural facility with the most untiring and fastidious labor. In debate images, illustrations, and arguments rose to his lips with a spontaneous redundance that astonished his hearers; but no writer elaborated his compositions more carefully, and his printers were often aghast at the multitude of his corrections and alterations. Nor did his intellectual powers in any degree dry up or dwarf his moral nature. There is no public man whose character is more clearly reflected in his life and in his intimate correspondence; and it may be confidently said that there is no other public man whose character was in all essential respects more transparently pure. Weak health, deep and fervent religious principles, and studious habits, saved him from the temptations of youth; and amid all the vicissitudes and corruption of politics his heart never lost its warmth, or his conscience its sensitiveness.