He resembled Bolingbroke in his power of passing at once from scenes of dissipation into the House of Commons, and in retaining in public affairs during the most disorderly periods of his private life all his soundness of judgment and all his force of eloquence and of decision. Gibbon described how he “prepared himself” for one important debate by spending twenty-two previous hours at the hazard table and losing eleven thousand pounds. Walpole extols the extraordinary brilliancy of the speech which he made on another occasion, when he had but just arrived from Newmarket and had been sitting up drinking the whole of the preceding night, and he states that in the early period of his brilliant opposition to the American policy of North he was rarely in bed before five in the morning, or out of it before two in the afternoon. Yet, like Bolingbroke, he never lost the taste and passion for study even at the time when he was most immersed in a life of pleasure.
At Eton and Oxford he had been a very earnest student, and few of his contemporaries can have had a wider knowledge of the imaginative literatures of Greece, Italy, or France. He was passionately fond of poetry, and a singularly delicate and discriminating critic; but he always looked upon literature chiefly from its ornamental and imaginative side. Incomparably the most important book relating to the art of government which appeared during his lifetime was the “Wealth of Nations,” but Fox once owned that he had never read it; and the history which was his one serious composition added nothing to his reputation. In books, however, he found an unfailing solace in trouble and disappointment. One morning, when one of his friends having heard that Fox on the previous night had been completely ruined at the gaming-table, went to visit and console him, he found him tranquilly reading Herodotus in the original. “What,” he said, “would you have a man do who has lost his last shilling?”
His merits as a politician can only he allowed with great deductions and qualifications. But little stress should indeed be laid on the sudden and violent change in his political principles, which was faintly foreshadowed in 1772 and fully accomplished in 1774, though that change did undoubtedly synchronize with his personal quarrel with Lord North. Changes of principle and policy, which at forty or fifty would indicate great instability of character, are very venial at twenty-four or twenty-five, and from the time when Fox joined the Whig party his career through long years of adversity and of trial was singularly consistent. I can not, however, regard a politician either as a great statesman or a great party leader who left so very little of permanent value behind him, who offended so frequently and so bitterly the national feelings of his countrymen, who on two memorable occasions reduced his party to the lowest stage of depression, and who failed so signally during a long public life in winning the confidence of the nation.
His failure is the more remarkable as one of the features most conspicuous both in his speeches and his letters is the general soundness of his judgment, and his opinions during the greater part of his life were singularly free from every kind of violence, exaggeration, and eccentricity. Much of it was due to his private life, much to his divergence from popular opinion on the American question and on the question of the French Revolution, and much also to an extraordinary deficiency in the art of party management, and to the frequent employment of language which, though eminently adapted to the immediate purposes of debate, was certain from its injudicious energy to be afterward quoted against him. Like more than one great master of words, he was trammeled and injured at every stage of his career by his own speeches. The extreme shock which the disastrous coalition of 1784 gave to the public opinion of England was largely, if not mainly, due to the outrageous violence of the language with which Fox had in the preceding years denounced Lord North, and a similar violence made his breach with the court irrevocable, and greatly aggravated his difference with the nation on the question of the French Revolution.
But if his rank as a statesman and as a party leader is by no means of the highest order, he stood, by the concurrent testimony of all his contemporaries, in the very first line, if not in the very first place, among English parliamentary debaters. He threw the whole energy of his character into his career, and he practiced it continually till he attained a dexterity in debate which to his contemporaries appeared little less than miraculous. “During five whole sessions,” he once said, “I spoke every night but one, and I regret only that I did not speak on that night.” With a delivery that in the beginning of his speeches was somewhat slow and hesitating, with little method, with great repetition, with no grace of gesture, with an utter indifference to the mere oratory of display, thinking of nothing but how to convince and persuade the audience who were immediately before him, never for a moment forgetting the vital issue, never employing an argument which was not completely level with the apprehensions of his audience, he possessed to the very highest degree the debating qualities which an educated political assembly of Englishmen most highly value.
The masculine vigor and strong common sense of his arguments, his unfailing lucidity, his power of grasping in a moment the essential issue of a debate, his skill in hitting blots and throwing the arguments on his own side into the most vivid and various lights, his marvelous memory in catching up the scattered threads of a debate, the rare combination in his speeches of the most glowing vehemence of style with the closest and most transparent reasoning, and the air of intense conviction which he threw into every discussion, had never been surpassed. He was one of the fairest of debaters, and it was said that the arguments of his opponents were very rarely stated with such masterly power as by Fox himself before he proceeded to grapple with, and to overthrow them.
He possessed to the highest degree what Walpole called the power of “declaiming argument,” and that combination of rapidity and soundness of judgment which is the first quality of a debater. “Others,” said Sir George Savile, “may have had more stock, but Fox had more ready money about him than any of his party.” “I believe,” said Lord Carlisle, “there never was a person yet created who had the faculty of reasoning like him.” “Nature,” said Horace Walpole, “had made him the most wonderful reasoner of the age.” “He possessed beyond all moderns,” wrote Mackintosh, “that union of reason, simplicity, and vehemence which formed the prince of orators.” “Had he been bred to the bar,” wrote Philip Francis, “he would in my judgment have made himself in a shorter time, and with much less application than any other man, the most powerful litigant that ever appeared there.” “He rose by slow degrees,” said Burke, “to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever saw.” His finest speeches were wholly unpremeditated, and the complete subordination in them of all rhetorical and philosophical ambition to the immediate purpose of the debate has greatly impaired their permanent value; but, even in the imperfect fragments that remain, the essential qualities of his eloquence may be plainly seen.
JEAN PAUL MARAT.
By HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.
[A leader of the revolutionary Reign of Terror in France, born in 1744, assassinated by Charlotte Corday in 1793. His energy and ferocity made him a power, which he never could have become by his talents. He was the right hand of Robespierre, and the principal agent in the destruction of the Girondist party in 1793. With Danton and Robespierre he formed the triumvirate which turned France into a vast human shambles.]
Three men among the Jacobins—Marat, Danton, and Robespierre—merited distinction and possessed authority. Owing to a malformation, or distortion, of head and heart, they fulfilled the requisite conditions. Of the three, Marat is the most monstrous; he borders on the lunatic, of which he displays the chief characteristics—furious exaltation, constant overexcitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and tetanus of the will under the constraint and rule of a fixed idea, and, in addition to this, the usual physical symptoms, such as sleeplessness, a livid tint, bad blood, foulness of dress and person, with, during the last five months of his life, irritations and eruptions over his whole body. Issuing from incongruous races, born of a mixed blood, and tainted with serious moral commotions, he harbors within him a singular germ; physically he is an abortion, morally a pretender, and one who covets all places of distinction.