CH. XL. CHARACTER OF HIS SPEAKING. 189 hement, impetuous torrent of his eloquence, kindling as it flowed, and the nervous motions of his countenance reflected the ungovernable excitement under which he laboured; and while Fox could cast off without an effort the cares of public life and pass at once from Parliament to a night of dissipation at Brooks's, Burke returned from debate jaded, irritated, and soured. With an intellect capable of the very highest efforts of judicial wisdom he combined the passions of the most violent partisan, and in the excitement of debate these too often obtained the ascendancy. Few things are more curious than the contrast between the feverish and passionate excitement with which he threw himself into party debates, and the admirably calm, exhaustive, and impartial summaries of the rival arguments which he afterwards drew up for the 'Annual Register.' Though a most skilful and penetrating critic, and though his English style is one of the very finest in the language, his taste was not pure. Even his best writings are sometimes disfigured by strangely coarse and repulsive images, and gross violations of taste appear to have been frequent in his speeches. It is probable that in his case the hasty reports in the 'Parliamentary History' and in the Cavendish Debates' are more than commonly defective, for Burke was a very rapid speaker, and his language had the strongly marked individuality which reporters rarely succeed in conveying; but no one who judged by these reports would place his speeches in the first rank, and some of them are wild and tawdry almost to insanity. Nor does he appear to have possessed any histrionic power. His voice had little charm. He had a strong Irish accent, and Erskine described his delivery as 'execrable,' and declared that in some of his finest speeches he emptied the House.2 It is related of Coleridge that a very experienced shorthand writer was employed to take down his lectures on Shakespeare, and that his manuscript proved almost unintelligible. The reporter afterwards said that from long experience he had, with every other speaker he had ever heard, been almost always able to guess the form of the latter part of each sentence by the form of the beginning, but that the conclusion of every one of Coleridge's sentences was a surprise to him. There are excellent descriptions of Burke's speaking in Wraxall's Memoirs, ii. 35-38; Walpole's Memoirs of George III. ii. 273, 274; Last Journals, i. 84, 85, 443; and in the letters in Lady Minto's Life of Sir G. Elliot. See too Butler's Reminiscences, pp. 166-168. Erskine's very unfavourable description of his manner is given in Campbell's Chancellors, ix. 68, 69. Lord Brougham, in his sketch of Burke Statesmen of George III.), has collected several instances of his glaring bad taste. Another, too gross for quotation, will be found in Jesse's Life of Selwyn, iv. 130, 131. Gerard Hamilton once said that while everywhere ele Burke seemed the first man, in the House of Commons hr appeared only the second. At the same time there is ample evidence that with all his defects he was from the first a great power in the House, and that in the early part of his career, and almost always on occasions of great importance, his eloquence had a wonderful power upon his hearers. Pitt passed into the House of Lords almost immediately after Burke had entered the Commons. Fox was then a boy. Sheridan had not yet become a member; and his fellow-countryman, Barré, though a rhetorician of great if somewhat coarse power, was completely eclipsed by the splendour and the variety of the talents of Burke. Charles Townshend alone, who shone for a few years with a meteoric brilliancy in English politics, was regarded as his worthy rival. Johnson wrote to Langton with great delight that Burke by his first speeches in the House had gained more reputation than perhaps any man at his first appearance ever gained before.'1 'An Irishman, Mr. Burke, is sprung up,' wrote the American General Lee, who was then watching London politics with great care, 'who has astonished everybody with the power of his eloquence and his comprehensive knowledge in all our exterior and internal politics and commercial interests. He wants nothing but that sort of dignity annexed to rank and property in England to make him the most considerable man in the Lower House.' Grattan, who on a question of oratory was one of the most competent of judges, wrote in 1769, 'Burke is unquestionably the first orator among the Commons of England, boundless in knowledge, instantaneous in his apprehensions, and abundant in his language. He speaks with profound attention and acknowledged superiority, notwithstanding the want of energy, the want of grace, and the want of elegance in his manner.' Horace Walpole, who hated Burke, acknowledged that he was' versed in every branch of eloquence,' that he possessed the quickest conception, Wilkes said that the Venus of Burke 'was sometimes the Venus of whisky.' 'What will they think,' Sheridan once said, of the public speaking of this age in after times when they read Mr. Burke's speeches and are told that in his day he was not accounted 3 either the first or second speaker?'- p. 177. 2 Chatham Correspondence, iii. 111 Grattan's Life, i. 142. CH. XI CHARACTER OF HIS SPEAKING. 6 191 amazing facility of elocution, great strength of argumentation, all the power of imagination and memory,' that even his unpremeditated speeches displayed a choice and variety of language, a profusion of metaphors, and a correctness of diction that was surprising,' and that in public though not in private life his wit was of the highest order, 'luminous, striking, and abundant.' He complained, however, with good reason that he often lost himself in a torrent of images and copiousness,' that he dealt abundantly too much in establishing general positions,' that he had no address or insinuation;' that his speeches often showed a great want of sobriety and judgment, and the still greater want of art to touch the passions.'1 6 But though their length, their excursiveness, and their didactic character did undoubtedly on many occasions weary and even empty the House, there were others in which Burke showed a power both of fascinating and of moving such as very few speakers have attained. Gibbon, whose sinecure place was swept away by the Economical Reform Bill of 1782, bears testimony to the delight with which that diffusive and ingenious orator, Mr. Burke, was heard by all sides of the House, and even by those whose existence he proscribed.' Walpole has himself repeatedly noticed the effect which the speeches of Burke produced upon the hearers. Describing one of those against the American war, he says that the wit of one part 'excited the warmest and most continued bursts of laughter even from Lord North, Rigby, and the ministers themselves,' while the pathos of another part 'drew iron tears down Barré's cheek,' and Governor Johnston exclaimed that he was now glad that strangers were excluded, as if they had been admitted Burke's speech would have excited them to tear ministers to pieces as they went out of the House.' 3 Sir Gilbert Elliot, describing one of Burke's speeches on the Warren Hastings' impeachment, says: 'He did not, I believe, leave a dry eye in the whole assembly.' Making every allowance for the enthusiasm of a French Royalist for the author of the Reflections on the French Revolution,' the graphic description by the Duke de Levis of one of Burke's latest speeches 4 3 Walpole's Last Journals, ii. 194. Walpole's Letters, vii. 29, 30. Lady Minto's Life of Sir Gilbert Elliot. i. 195. on that subject is sufficient to show the magnetism of his eloquence even at the end of his career. 'He made the whole House pass in an instant from the tenderest emotions of feeling to bursts of laughter; never was the electric power of eloquence more imperiously felt. This extraordinary man seemed to raise and quell the passions of his auditors with as much ease and as rapidly as a skilful musician passes into the various modulations of his harpsichord. I have witnessed many, too many, political assemblages and striking scenes where eloquence performed a noble part, but the whole of them appear insipid when compared with this amazing effort.'1 There are few things, I think, more melancholy in English history than that Chatham and Burke should never have been cordially united. They were incomparably the ablest men then living in English politics. Both of them were men of high honour, of stainless morals, of pure and disinterested patriotism, but though often approaching there was always something that kept them asunder. The conduct of Pitt towards the first Rockingham Ministry, and the opposition of the Rockingham party to the Ministry of Grafton, sowed dissensions between them, and they were profoundly different in their characters and their intellects. Burke, whose leaning was always to the side of caution, and usually to the side of authority, was very deficient in that power of popular sympathy which Chatham so eminently possessed; and his nature, at once proud, simple, retiring, and sensitive, shrank from the imperious and impracticable arrogance, and from the elaborate and theatrical ostentation of Chatham. In public he sometimes spoke of him with warm eulogy. Even when he censured his policy, as, for example, in his famous and most admirable description of the illassorted and heterogeneous character of his second ministry, his language was studiously deferential and moderate; and on the death of Chatham, Burke was one of the first to pay a generous tribute to his memory, but it is quite evident from his private correspondence, extending over many years, that his admiration for him was largely mixed with dislike. On almost every important question we find some serious divergence of opinion. On the great question of America, they were agreed 1 Prior's Burke, ii. 472. in reprobating the Stamp Act and in desiring its repeal; but they differed in principle about the Declaratory Act, and they differed in policy about the commercial restrictions. In October 1766 Grafton, in his own name and in that of Conway, urged upon Chatham the necessity of securing the services of Burke, 'the readiest man upon all points, perhaps, in the whole House.' 'The gentleman you have pointed out as a necessary recruit,' replied Chatham, 'I think a man of parts and an ingenious speaker. As to his notions and maxims of trade they never can be mine.'1 On the constitutional questions arising from the Middlesex election both sections of the party were agreed, but the Rockinghams would have been content without a dissolution, and they looked with much more reserve and hesitation than Chatham on the democratic agitation which was raised against the Parliament. On the question of the East India Company they were violently opposed. Chatham desired that the territorial possessions of the Company should be gradually taken under the direct dominion of the Crown; that the immense revenues derived from the treaties of Clive in Bengal should accrue to the national exchequer; and that the Crown should interfere to put an end to the scandalous oppression of the natives. 'India,' he wrote, 'teems with iniquities so rank as to smell to earth and heaven. The reformation of them, if pursued in a pure spirit of justice, might exalt the nation and endear the English name through the world. The putting under circumscription and control the high and dangerous prerogative of war and alliances, so abused in India, I cannot but approve, as it shuts the door against such insatiable rapine and detestable enormities as have on some occasions stained the English name and disgraced human nature.' The subject gave rise to long and intricate discussions in 1766 and the three following years, and considerable restrictions were imposed on the powers of the Company. In 1767 an Act was passed which, among other provisions, restrained it from making a dividend of more than ten per cent., and two years later an Act guaranteed the Com Chatham Correspondence, iii. 110, 111. Lord Stanhope's list. of England, v. app. p. x. VOL. III. 2 See the Chatham Correspondence, especially iii. 61, 199, 200, 216, 269; iv. 276, 277. |