Part 35

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.

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.

His father, who was a physician, intended from his early childhood that he should be a _savant_; his mother, an idealist, meant that he should be a philanthropist, while he himself always steered his course toward both summits. “At five years of age,” he says, “it would have pleased me to be a schoolmaster, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, and a creative genius at twenty,” and afterward, up to the last, an apostle and martyr to humanity. “From my earliest infancy I had an intense love of fame, which changed its object at various stages of my life, but which never left me for a moment.” He rambled over Europe or vegetated in Paris for thirty years, living a nomadic life in subordinate positions; hissed as an author, distrusted as a man of science, and ignored as a philosopher; a third rate political writer, aspiring to every sort of celebrity and to every honor, constantly presenting himself as a candidate and as constantly rejected--too great a disproportion between his faculties and ambition.

Talentless, possessing no critical acumen, and of mediocre intelligence, he was fitted only to teach some branch of the sciences, or to practice some one of the arts, either as professor or doctor, more or less bold and lucky, or to follow, with occasional slips on one side or the other, some path clearly marked out for him. Never did man with such diversified culture possess such an incurably perverted intellect. Never did man, after so many abortive speculations and such repeated malpractices, conceive and maintain so high an opinion of himself. Each of these two sources in him augments the other; through his faculty of not seeing things as they are, he attributes to himself virtue and genius; satisfied that he possesses genius and virtue, he regards his misdeeds as merits and his crotchets as truths.

Thenceforth, and spontaneously, his malady runs its own course and becomes complex; next to the ambitious delirium comes the _mania for persecution_. In effect, the evident or demonstrated truths which he supplies should strike the public at once; if they burn slowly or miss fire, it is owing to their being stamped out by enemies or the envious; manifestly, they have conspired against him, and against him plots have never ceased. First came the philosophers’ plot; when his treatise on “Man” reached Paris from Amsterdam, “they felt the blow I struck at their principles and had the book stopped at the custom-house.” Next came the plot of the doctors, who “ruefully estimated my enormous gains. Were it necessary, I could prove that they often met together to consider the best way to destroy my reputation.” Finally, came the plot of the academicians; “the disgraceful persecution I had to undergo from the Academy of Sciences for two years, after being satisfied that my discoveries on light upset all that it had done for a century, and that I was quite indifferent about becoming a member of its body.... Would it be believed that these scientific charlatans succeeded in underrating my discoveries throughout Europe, in exciting every society of _savants_ against me, and in closing against me all the newspapers!” Naturally, the would-be-persecuted man defends himself--that is to say, he attacks. Naturally, as he is the aggressor, he is repulsed and put down, and, after creating imaginary enemies, he creates real ones, especially in politics, where, on principle, he daily preaches insurrection and murder.

Naturally, in fine, he is prosecuted, convicted at the Chatelet Court, tracked by the police, obliged to fly and wander from one hiding-place to another; to live like a bat “in a cellar, underground, in a dark dungeon”; once, says his friend Panis, he passed “six weeks on one of his buttocks,” like a madman in his cell, face to face with his reveries. It is not surprising that, with such a system, the reverie should become more intense, more and more gloomy, and at last settle down into a _confirmed nightmare_; that, in his distorted brain, objects should appear distorted; that, even in full daylight, men and things should seem awry, as in a magnifying, dislocating mirror; that frequently, on the numbers (of his journal) appearing too blood-thirsty, and his chronic disease too acute, his physician should bleed him to arrest these attacks and prevent their return. When a madman sees everywhere around him--on the floors, on the walls, on the ceiling--toads, scorpions, spiders, swarms of crawling, loathsome vermin, he thinks only of crushing them, and the disease enters on its last stage; after the ambitious delirium, the mania for persecution, and the settled nightmare, comes the homicidal mania. At the outset a few lives would have sufficed: “Five hundred heads ought to have fallen when the Bastile was taken, and all would then have gone on well.” But, through lack of foresight and timidity, the evil was allowed to spread, and the more it spread the larger the amputation should have been. With the sure, keen eye of the surgeon, Marat gives its dimensions; he has made his calculation beforehand. In September, 1792, in the Council at the Commune, he estimates approximatively forty thousand as the number of heads that should be laid low. Six weeks later, the social abscess having enormously increased, the figures swell in proportion; he now demands two hundred and seventy thousand heads, always on the score of humanity, “to insure public tranquillity,” on condition that the operation be intrusted to him, as the summary, temporary justiciary. Save this last point the rest is granted to him; it is unfortunate that he could not see with his own eyes the complete fulfillment of his programme, the batches condemned by the revolutionary tribunal, the massacres of Lyons and Toulon, the drownings of Nantes. From first to last he was in the right line of the revolution; lucid on account of his blindness, thanks to his crazy logic, thanks to the concordance of his personal malady with the public malady, to the precocity of his complete madness alongside of the incomplete or tardy madness of the rest, he alone steadfast, remorseless, triumphant, perched aloft, at the first bound, on the sharp pinnacle, which his rivals dared not climb, or only stumbled up.

PRINCE TALLEYRAND.

BY ARCHIBALD ALISON.

[Charles Maurice Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, one of the most distinguished of modern French statesmen and diplomatists, born in 1754, died in 1838. Originally a churchman, he became Bishop of Autun in 1788, though notorious for loose and licentious living. During the period of the revolution Talleyrand was in England and America. He returned to France in 1797, and under the Directory was called to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He was of great assistance to Napoleon in accomplishing his _coup d’état_, and thenceforward was the French ruler’s trusted adviser in all matters of state till 1807, when a coldness grew on Napoleon’s part. Talleyrand’s bitter and pungent criticisms on Napoleon’s policy so enraged the emperor that he finally deprived him of his lucrative offices. In 1812 he foretold the coming downfall of Napoleon, and the accomplishment of the prediction achieved for him the admiration of Europe. While the allies were advancing on Paris in 1814, Talleyrand was in secret communication with them. After the restoration of the Bourbons, Talleyrand took but little part in public affairs till 1830, when, as ambassador to England, he negotiated an important treaty settling the status of the peninsula kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.]