Historical Characters

During these events the Czar Alexander died; and for some little time there was hesitation in the Imperial counsels. Alexander’s successor, however, soon pursued the policy which his accession to the empire had interrupted, and propositions (not unlike those formerly contemplated) were now submitted to our Minister, propositions in the carrying out of which Great Britain and Russia were alone to be combined. The circumstances of the moment showed that the period of action had arrived, and Mr. Canning no longer shrank from accepting a part which there appeared some hope of undertaking with success.

An alliance between two powers, indeed, afforded a fairer chance of fixing upon a definite course, and maintaining a common understanding, than the various counsels amongst which union had previously been sought. The Greeks also, who had formerly rejected all schemes of compromise (May, 1826), now requested the good offices of England for obtaining a peace upon conditions which would have recognised the supremacy of the Sultan, and entailed a tribute upon his former subjects. Finally (and this affords an interpretation to the whole of that policy which prevailed in the British counsels, from the first to the last moment of negotiation), the treaty of alliance into which Mr. Canning felt disposed to enter, contained this condition:

“That neither Russia nor Great Britain should obtain any advantage for themselves in the arrangement of those affairs which they undertook to settle.”

France became subsequently a party to this scheme of intervention, and it was hoped that a confederacy so powerful would induce the Turks to submit quietly to the measures which it had been determined, at all events (by a secret article), if necessary, to enforce.

But whilst these projects were being carried out, these hopes entertained, that dread King, more potent than all others, held his hand uplifted over the head of the triumphant and still ardent statesman.

XI

On the 2nd of July Parliament had been prorogued; on the 6th the triple alliance was signed. This celebrated treaty was the last act of Mr. Canning’s official life. The fatigues of the session, short as it had been, had brought him near the goal to which the enterprising mind and assiduous labours of our most eminent men have too often prematurely conducted them. Of a susceptibility which the slightest word of good or evil keenly affected, and of that sanguine and untiring temperament which would never suffer him to repose during circumstances in which he thought his personal honour, his public opinions, and the welfare of his political friends required his exertions: tortured by every sneer, irritated by every affront, ready for every toil; in the last few months in which he had risen to the heights of power and ambition – such are human objects – was concentrated an age of anxiety, suffering, and endurance. His countenance became more haggard, his step more feeble, and his eye more languid. Yet at this moment, jaded, restless, and worn, he held in the opinion of the world as high and enviable a position as any public man ever enjoyed. All his plans had succeeded; all his enemies had been overthrown. By the people of England he was cherished as a favourite child; on the Continent he was beloved as the tutelary guardian of Liberal principles, and respected as the peaceful and fortunate arbiter between conflicting interests. Abroad, one of the most formidable alliances ever united against England had been silently defeated by his efforts. At home, the most powerful coalition that a haughty aristocracy could form against himself had been successfully defied by his eloquence and good fortune. The foes of Don Miguel, in Portugal; the enemies of the Inquisition in Spain; the fervent watchers after that dawn of civilization, which now opened on the vast empires of the New World, and which promised again to shine upon the region it most favoured in ancient times; the American patriot, the Greek freedman, and last of all, though not the least interested (whether we consider the wrongs he had endured, the rights to which he was justly born, the links which should have joined him to, and the injustice which had severed him from, the national prosperity of Great Britain), last of all, the Irish Catholic, dwelt fondly and anxiously on the breath of the aspiring statesman at the head of affairs. His health was too precious, indeed, for any one to believe it to be in danger.

The wound, notwithstanding, was given, which no medicine had the power to cure. On the 1st of August the Prime Minister gave a diplomatic dinner; on the 3rd he was seized with those symptoms which betokened a fatal crisis to be at hand. At this time he was at the Duke of Devonshire’s villa at Chiswick, where he had resided since the 20th of July, for the sake of greater quiet and purer air. The room in which he lay, and in which another as proud and generous a spirit, that of Mr. Fox, had passed away, and towards which the eyes of the whole Liberal world were now turned with agonizing suspense for five days, has since become a place of pilgrimage. It is a small low chamber, once a kind of nursery, dark, and opening into a wing of the building, which gives it the appearance of looking into a courtyard. Nothing can be more simple than its furniture or decorations, for it was chosen by Mr. Canning, who had always the greatest horror of cold, on account of its warmth. On one side of the fireplace are a few bookshelves; opposite the foot of the bed is the low chimneypiece, and on it a small bronze clock, to which we may fancy the weary and impatient sufferer often turning his eyes during those bitter moments in which he was passing from the world which he had filled with his name, and was governing with his projects. What a place for repeating those simple and touching lines of Dyer:

“A little rule, a little sway,A sunbeam on a winter’s day,Is all the proud and mighty haveBetween the cradle and the grave.”

After passing some time in a state of insensibility, during which the words “Spain and Portugal” were frequently on his lips, on the 8th of August Mr. Canning succumbed. His remains sleep in Westminster Abbey; a peerage and a pension were granted to his family; and a statue is erected to his memory on the site of his parliamentary triumphs.

The generation amidst which Mr. Canning died, attended his hearse, and crowned his funeral with honours. What is the place he ought to hold in the minds of future generations of his countrymen?

Part V

One must judge men by a real and not ideal standard of mankind. – Criticisms on Mr. Canning’s conduct. – His faults when in a subordinate position. – His better qualities developed in a superior one. – Nature of faculties. – Influence on his own time and the succeeding one. – Foreign policy considered. – Person; manners; specimens of his various abilities; eloquence; art; and turn for drollery and satire. – Style of speaking of despatches. – Always young, and inspiring admiration and affection, even when provoking censure.

I

In estimating the character of public men, the biographer or critic, if he descend from the sublimity of unbounded panegyric, is often apt to elevate himself at the expense of the person of whom he speaks; and to treat with artificial severity any dereliction from that perfection of conduct which he sees nowhere attained. Thanks to this affected severity or paltry envy, we have hardly a great man left to us. Bolingbroke is nothing but a quack; the elder Pitt only a charlatan; Burke himself a declaimer and a renegade; Fox an ambitious politician out of place; all of which things these great men to a certain degree were, being still great men; and deserving the admiration of a posterity which can hardly hope to furnish their equals.

“No one should write history,” said Montaigne, “who has not himself served the State in some civil or military capacity.” By which this shrewd and impartial observer meant, that no man is fit to judge the conduct of men of action who is not himself a man of action, and can judge it practically, according to what men really are in the world, and not according to any imaginary theory which he may adopt in the obscure nook of his own chimney corner, as to what they might and ought to be.

“We are not,” says Cicero, “in the Republic of Plato, but in the mud of Romulus;” and they who have observed and meditated upon the vicissitudes of empires, will have seen that such have risen or fallen according to the number of eminent men, endowed with lofty intelligences and daring spirits, whom they have produced. And where have such eminent men existed without defects? Human nature is too imperfect for us to expect to find extraordinary abilities and energies under the constant control of moderate virtues.

To those, then, who have read the preceding pages, the whole of Mr. Canning’s career may be shortly summed up in the words of Lord Orford (Horace Walpole), who, speaking of Lord Chatham, says:

“His ambition was to be the most illustrious man in the first country in the world, and he thought that the eminence of glory could not be sullied by the steps to it being passed irregularly” (vol. iv. p. 243).

In the same manner Canning was less scrupulous than he should have been to obtain power and fame. But, in the most memorable part of his life, he made a noble use of the one and well deserved the other. Desirous of office and distinction, he attached himself, on entering life, to that minister by whom office and distinction were most likely to be conferred. The circumstances of the time afforded him not merely an apology, but a fair reason for doing this; still, there seems no injustice in adding that, in ranging himself under the banner of the great commoner’s great son, he thought of his own personal prospects as well as of the public interests.

Mr. Pitt died; Mr. Canning was, as he declared himself, henceforth without a leader. Some of his opinions inclined him to unite with his early friends and recent opponents (the Whigs), who then came into office; and this, it seems, he was on the point of doing, when, by a sudden whirl of Fortune’s wheel, the persons he was seceding from were jerked into power, and those he was about to join jerked out of it. A young man, conscious of his own abilities, and satisfied in his own mind that, however he might obtain influence, he would use it for the public advantage, he did not refuse a high situation from the party to which he still publicly belonged, in order to follow a party just driven from the Administration, and with which he had but begun to treat.

There are things to say in excuse of this conduct, and I have said them; but no one who wishes that Mr. Canning’s life had been without a flaw, can do otherwise than regret that the statesman who made so many subsequent sacrifices for the Catholics, should have joined, at this juncture, a Ministry which rallied its partisans under the cry of “No Popery!”

It is likewise to be regretted that having so frequently expressed his sense of the incapacity of Lord Castlereagh, he should nevertheless have consented first to serve as a subordinate under him when he was mismanaging foreign affairs; and, secondly, to serve as a colleague with him when he was alike lowering us abroad and misgoverning us at home.

During four years he did not shrink from the promulgation of any arbitrary edict – from the suppression of any popular right; and though I admit that many liberal and prudent persons (influenced, I cannot but think, by most exaggerated apprehensions) considered that the strongest measures were necessary at that time to control a spirit of insurrection, which the mingled harshness and incapacity of the ruling Administration had provoked; still, there is a great difference between men who sanction bad laws which a bad government, in which they have had no share, may render momentarily necessary, and men who bring forward bad laws as the result of a bad government which has been carried on by themselves.

It is hardly an excuse to say his errors were committed in an inferior situation, with the idea of rising to a commanding one; but, at all events, when he reached the eminence towards which he had so long been toiling, he made, as I have shown, the best use of that power which had not always been sought for by the best means. Thus, from first to last, we see a man anxious to have power and to use it well; but as anxious to have it as to use it well. That he was blamed and praised with exaggeration was natural; for amidst confronting arrays he was seen for ever in the first rank with the most glittering arms, exciting the admiration of friends and the hatred of foes by his scornful air and ostentatious attitude of defiance.

His talents, by nature showy, were given their peculiar turn by his early education, and his career was shaped to the paths which offered to lead him most easily to distinction. Trained to the juvenile task of writing a foreign language in polished periods, he was at times less anxious to find solid arguments than striking expressions. Not brought up in communication with the uneducated classes, he was more keenly alive to the opinion of the cultivated and refined. Too accommodating as to the temporary suspension of national freedom at home, he was constantly anxious and determined to maintain the power and prestige of the country abroad – throughout his whole life he exhibited the effects of the public school and the close borough.

Like most men who have become illustrious, Mr. Canning owed much to fortune. Lucky in the time of his decease, lucky in the times at which many of those with whom he had hitherto acted deserted him. If he had lived longer, it would have been difficult for him to have kept the station to which he had risen: if he had not been left when he was by a great portion of his party, he would never have obtained the popularity by which his death was hallowed. To few has it happened to be supported by a set of men just as long as their support was useful, – to be quitted by them just when their alliance would have been injurious. The persons who as friends gave Mr. Canning power, as enemies conferred on him reputation. That reputation was above all others, at the time of his demise, amongst his countrymen and contemporaries; and it still retains its predominance, though the influence which he exercised over our domestic policy, and over the events which succeeded his death, is not yet, perhaps, sufficiently recognised. I have already observed that if he had not been Prime Minister in 1827, it is not likely that Lord Grey would have been Premier in 1830. I may add that had not his appointment at the former period brought together all the elements of a great Liberal party, who were allied under the cry of Catholic Emancipation, thus giving a hope and a spirit to the Catholics which they had not previously possessed, the Duke of Wellington would not within a year or two afterwards have been forced to acknowledge that further resistance to them was impossible. Furthermore, if such men as Lord Melbourne, Lord Palmerston, the Grants, and a large party in the country looking up to these statesmen as safe as well as liberal guides – had not been already connected with the Whigs, and alienated from the Tories, under the influence of Mr. Canning in 1827, the Reform Bill would hardly have been proposed in 1830, and would certainly not have been carried in 1832. The more minutely, in short, that we examine the events of the last thirty-six years, the more we shall perceive how much their quiet development has been owing to Mr. Canning, and to the class of men whom Mr. Canning formed, and in his later days represented.

In determining his merits as director of the foreign policy of Great Britain, I have stood, I confess, by the old doctrines, and argued upon the assumption that England is a great state, disposed to maintain that greatness; that the English people is a proud, generous, and brave people, prepared to assert its principles and its position, and to assume its part in the affairs of the world – a nation that takes its share in the general policy of nations – that feels it has a common interest in the maintenance of justice, in the limitation of unscrupulous ambition, in the progress of civilization. I have supposed that the collective wisdom and experience of past ages, have taught us that human nature is ever, though under different forms, guided by the same rules; that the strong, unless they are adequately restrained, insult and oppress, and finally vanquish the weak; that those who under all circumstances are determined to be at peace, become eventually the certain victims of aggression and war; that the spirit of a people cannot with impunity be allowed to droop and languish without dimming the brightness of its genius and losing the force of its character. That a mere money-making population, which, lapped in the luxury of commercial prosperity, begins to disregard its nice sense of honour, its admiration for valour and daring, becomes daily weaker against the spoiler, and a greater temptation to spoliation. I have ventured to believe that a noble people has a heart open to noble emotions – that such a heart is not dead to pity for the unfortunate, to sympathy with the brave – to the love of glory inspiring to great deeds, and to the love of power, with the intention to use it for the public good. I do not think it wise to exchange the principles of action derived from these sentiments for a colder, less generous, and, as I feel convinced, a less sound code of political philosophy. The same sentiments which make one man considered and beloved above others, must distinguish the State aspiring to be great and beloved; but it does not follow that if you feel compassion for a drowning man, you are to plunge into the sea to save him if you cannot swim; that if you see two men valiantly struggling against two regiments, you are to rush into the middle of the combat with the certainty of not vanquishing the assailants, and with that of losing your own life. I condemn nations that interfere needlessly with the international affairs of others, as I should the lady who pretended to dictate to her neighbour how she should have her drawing-room swept, or her chimneys cleaned. I condemn governments which threaten heedlessly, and then fail to strike in spite of their threats; but I esteem governments which look carefully after their honour and interests, and do interfere when it is necessary or expedient to do so, in order either to defend that honour, or to maintain those interests; governments cautious to speak, but bold in acting up to their words.

It is with these views that I look upon the foreign policy of Mr. Canning, – a policy for giving England a great and proud position, – for giving to Englishmen a glorious and respected name; for safeguarding our shores by the universal prestige of our bravery and our power; for limiting the ambition of rival states, without needlessly provoking their animosity; for showing a wish to conciliate wherever moderation is displayed, and for displaying a resolution to resist when conciliation is repulsed – as a great English policy, with which the people of England will ever sympathize, and by which the permanent interests of England will best be preserved.

There are men who are anxious for civil commotion, which they think may be more easily brought about by concentrating the public mind on domestic grievances; there are men who are indifferent to the pride of country – who would as soon be Portuguese, Mexicans, or Moldo-Wallachians, as Englishmen. There are men who, though fame and consideration are the great objects of their countrymen, hold they ought not to be objects for their country. These will repudiate my opinion. But every Briton who is justly proud of his race, who will inquire from a small and despised state the value of being a great and renowned one, will, I believe, recognise the foreign policy I have been describing to be the true policy for maintaining the dignity and authority, without rashly risking the peaceful prosperity, of the British empire.

In person Mr. Canning was favoured by nature, being of a good height, of a strong frame, and of a regular and remarkably intelligent countenance. The glance of his eye when excited, and the smile of his lip when pleased, were often noted by his contemporaries.

“And on that turtle I saw a rider,A goodly man, with an eye so merry,I knew ’twas our foreign secretary,Who there at his ease did sit and smileLike Waterton on his crocodile;Cracking such jokes, at every motion,As made the turtle squeak with glee,And own that they gave him a lively notionOf what his own forced-meat balls would be.” A Dream of a Turtle.– T. Moore.

Charming in manner, as I have said, constant in attachments, it was observed of him at one period, that he was as dear to his friends as odious to the public.125

Ever ready to praise his subordinates, and to consult the tastes of his associates, he was honoured as a chief as much as he was relished as a companion. His accomplishments were various, and of a kind which may leave disputes open as to the degree of their excellence, but they were all of that brilliant and genial description which was sure to attract sympathy and procure reputation. How many must have chuckled over the following light and lazy piece of satire:

“I am like Archimedes for science and skill,I am like the young prince who went straight up the hill;And to interest the hearts of the fair be it said,I am like a young lady just bringing to bed.If you ask why the eleventh of June I rememberSo much better than April, or March, or December,’Tis because on that day, as with pride I assure ye,My sainted progenitor took to his brewery.On that day in the month he began making beer;On that night he commenced his connubial career.On that day he died when he had finished his summing,And the angels all cried ‘here’s old Whitbread a coming.’So that day I still hail with a smile and a sigh,For his beer with an e and his bier with an i;And that day every year, in the hottest of weather,The whole Whitbread family dine altogether.My Lords, while the beams of the hall shall supportThe roof which o’ershades this respectable court(Where Hastings was tried for oppressing the Hindoos),While the rays of the sun shall shine in these windowsMy name shall shine bright as my ancestor’s shines,Emblazoned on journals as his upon signs.”

How many must have felt their minds respond and their hearts bound at the following argumentative and spirited declamation:

“When the elective franchise was conceded to the Catholics of Ireland, that acknowledgment and anticipation, which I now call upon the House formally to ratify and realize, was, in point of fact, irrevocably pronounced. To give the latter the elective franchise was to admit him to political power; for, to make him an elector and at the same time to render him incapable of being elected, is to attract to our sides the lowest orders of the community, at the same time that we repel from us the highest orders of the gentry. This is not the surest or safest way to bind Ireland to the rest of the Empire in ties of affection. And what is there to prevent our union from being wrought more closely? Is there any moral – is there any physical obstacle? Opposuit natura? No such thing. We have already bridged the channel! Ireland now sits with us in the Representative Assembly of the Empire; and when she was allowed to come there, why was she not also allowed to bring with her some of her Catholic children? For many years, alas! we have been erecting a mound, not to assist or improve the inclinations of Providence, but to thwart them. We have raised it high above the waters, and it has stood there frowning hostility and effecting a separation. In the course of time, however, chance and design – the necessities of man and the sure workings of nature – have conspired to break down this mighty structure, till there remains of it only a narrow isthmus standing

‘between two kindred seas,Which mounting view each other from afar,And long to meet.’

What, then, shall be our conduct? Shall we attempt to repair the breaches, and fortify the ruins? A hopeless and ungracious undertaking! or shall we leave them to moulder away by time and accident? a sure but distant and thankless consummation! Or shall we not rather cut away at once the isthmus that remains, allow free course to the current which our artificial impediments have constructed, and float upon the mighty waters the ark of our common constitution?”

And we are now to be told that this same man, so playful and jocose, so ornamented and brilliant, was a close arguer, and indefatigable in attendance at his office. But though always ready for business, he would not scruple to introduce a piece of drollery into the most serious affairs. For instance: