Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent for borrowing. The idea, the faculty of another man he can make his; the man himself he can make his. “All reflex and echo (tout de reflet et de réverbère)!” snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but will not. Crabbed old Friend of Men! it is his sociality, his aggregative nature; and will now be the quality of qualities for him. In that forty years’ “struggle against despotism” he has gained the glorious faculty of self-help, and yet not lost the glorious natural gift of fellowship, of being helped. Rare union; this man can live self-sufficing—yet lives also in the life of other men; can make men love him, work with him; a born king of men!
But consider further how, as the old marquis still snarls, he has “made away with (humé, swallowed, snuffed-up) all formulas”—a fact, which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean much. This is no man of system, then; he is only a man of instincts and insights. A man, nevertheless, who will glare fiercely on any object, and see through it and conquer it; for he has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with logic-spectacles, but with an eye! Unhappily without decalogue, moral code, or theorem of any fixed sort, yet not without a strong living soul in him, and sincerity there; a reality, not an artificiality, not a sham! And so he, having struggled “forty years against despotism,” and “made away with all formulas,” shall now become the spokesman of a nation bent to do the same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off despotism; to make away with her old formulas—having found them naught, worn out, far from the reality? She will make away with such formulas—and even go bare, if need be, till she have found new ones.
Toward such work, in such manner, marches he, this singular Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-locks under the slouch-hat, he steps along there. A fiery fuliginous mass, which could not be choked and smothered, but would fill all France with smoke. And now it has got air; it will burn its whole substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere, too, and fill all France with flame. Strange lot! Forty years of that smoldering, with foul fire-damp and vapor enough; then victory over that—and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high; and for twenty-three resplendent months pours out in flame and molten fire-torrents all that is in him, the Pharos and wonder-sign of an amazed Europe—and then lies hollow, cold forever! Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honoré, the greatest of them all; in the whole national deputies, in the whole nation, there is none like and none second to thee.
CHARLES JAMES FOX.
By WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.
[An eminent orator and statesman, born 1749, died 1806. Fox was noted as being the greatest man of his age in parliamentary debate. He was the son of Sir Henry Fox, afterward Lord Holland, and was elected to Parliament while scarcely yet of age. Fox was identified with the Whig party, and contributed greatly to the success and firm establishment of liberal and reform principles in politics, though his private life was careless and dissolute. Though peerless as a debater, Fox was unsuccessful in commanding public respect and confidence during his short experiment as premier, and was for the most of his career a leader of the opposition. The memory of Fox is endeared to Americans by his sympathy with our revolutionary struggle, his persistent efforts to prevent the war before it began, and to secure an early concession of American independence after the beginning of hostilities.]
Charles James Fox was the third son of the first Lord Holland, the old rival of Pitt. He had entered Parliament irregularly and illegally in November, 1768, when he had not yet completed his twentieth year, and in February, 1770, he had been made a lord of the admiralty in the Government of Lord North. The last political connection of Lord Holland had been with Bute, and his son appears to have accepted the heritage of his Tory principles without inquiry or reluctance. His early life was in the highest degree discreditable, and gave very little promise of greatness. His vehement and passionate temperament threw him speedily into the wildest dissipation, and the almost insane indulgence of his father gratified his every whim. When he was only fourteen Lord Holland had brought him to the gambling-table at Spa, and, at a time when he had hardly reached manhood, he was one of the most desperate gamblers of his day. Lord Holland died in 1774, but before his death he is said to have paid no less than one hundred and forty thousand pounds in extricating his son from gambling debts. The death of his mother and the death of his elder brother in the same year brought him a considerable fortune, including an estate in the Isle of Thanet and the sinecure office of clerk of the pells in Ireland, which was worth two thousand three hundred pounds a year; but in a short time he was obliged to sell or mortgage everything he possessed. He himself nicknamed his antechamber the Jerusalem Chamber from the multitude of Jews who haunted it. Lord Carlisle was at one time security for him to the extent of fifteen or sixteen thousand pounds. During one of the most critical debates in 1781 his house was in the occupation of the sheriffs. He was even debtor for small sums to chairmen and to waiters at Brooks’s; and although in the latter part of his life he was partly relieved by a large subscription raised by his friends, he never appears to have wholly emerged from the money difficulties in which his gambling tastes had involved him. Nor was this his only vice.
With some men the passion for gambling is an irresistible moral monomania, the single morbid taint in a nature otherwise faultless and pure. With Fox it was but one of many forms of an insatiable appetite for vicious excitement, which continued with little abatement during many years of his public career. In 1777, during a long visit to Paris, he lived much in the society of Madame du Deffand, and that very acute judge of character formed an opinion of him which was, on the whole, very unfavorable. He has much talent, she said, much goodness of heart and natural truthfulness, but he is absolutely without principle, he has a contempt for every one who has principle, he lives in a perpetual intoxication of excitement, he never gives a thought to the morrow, he is a man eminently fitted to corrupt youth. In 1779, when he was already one of the foremost politicians in England, he was one night drinking at Almack’s with Lord Derby, Major Stanley, and a few other young men of rank, when they determined at three in the morning to make a tour through the streets, and amused themselves by instigating a mob to break the windows of the chief members of the Government.
His profligacy with women during a great part of his life was notorious, though he appears at last to have confined himself to his connection with Mrs. Armistead, whom he secretly married in September, 1795. He was the soul of a group of brilliant and profligate spendthrifts, who did much to dazzle and corrupt the fashionable youth of the time; and in judging the intense animosity with which George III always regarded him, it must not be forgotten that his example and his friendship had probably a considerable influence in encouraging the Prince of Wales in those vicious habits and in that undutiful course of conduct which produced so much misery in the palace and so much evil in the nation. One of the friends of Charles Fox summed up his whole career in a few significant sentences. “He had three passions—women, play, and politics. Yet he never formed a creditable connection with a woman. He squandered all his means at the gaming-table, and, except for eleven months, he was invariably in opposition.”
That a man of whom all this can be truly said should have taken a high and honorable place in English history, and should have won for himself the perennial love and loyalty of some of the best Englishmen of his time, is not a little surprising, for a life such as I have described would with most men have destroyed every fiber of intellectual energy and of moral worth. But in truth there are some characters which nature has so happily compounded that even vice is unable wholly to degrade them, and there is a charm of manner and of temper which sometimes accompanies the excesses of a strong animal nature that wins more popularity in the world than the purest and the most self-denying virtue. Of this truth Fox was an eminent example. With a herculean frame, with iron nerves, with that happy vividness and buoyancy of temperament that can ever throw itself passionately into the pursuits and the impressions of the hour, and can then cast them aside without an effort, he combined one of the sweetest of human tempers, one of the warmest of human hearts.
Nothing in his career is more remarkable than the spell which he cast over men who in character and principles were as unlike as possible to himself. “He is a man,” said Burke, “made to be loved, of the most artless, candid, open, and benevolent disposition; disinterested in the extreme, of a temper mild and placable to a fault, without one drop of gall in his whole constitution.” “The power of a superior man,” said Gibbon, “was blended in his attractive character with the softness and simplicity of a child. Perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood.” “He possessed,” said Erskine, “above all men I ever knew, the most gentle, and yet the most ardent spirit.” He retained amid all his vices a capacity for warm and steady friendship, a capacity for struggling passionately and persistently in opposition, for an unpopular cause; a purity of taste and a love of literature which made him, with the exception of Burke, the foremost scholar among the leading members of the House of Commons; an earnestness, disinterestedness, and simplicity of character which was admitted and admired even by his political opponents.