BOOKS.

LORD CLIVE.*

AT last we have got a Life of Clive which is worthy of its subject. Hitherto Clive, as great and as memorable in character, in intel- lect, and in the power of expression as he was in action, has lain under the grievous disability of imperfect biography. There has not only been no adequate Life of Clive, but till now the world has had little or no chance of reading the superlatively wise and statesmanlike despatches, letters, and speeches in which Clive not merely dealt with the troubles of the moment, but laid down for all time the principles which ought to govern indi- viduals and nations in their dealings with Asiatics and Asian politics. But even worse than this neglect of Olive's doings and sayings was the fact that what little was known to the publio about him was derived from what can only be described as Diaeaulayei brilliant caricature. That caricature is no doubt fascinating, incisive, and, like many caricatures in pint and in line, sympathetic, and meant to be sympathetic. Yet for all that, and for all its many attraotions, the famous-essay is a caricature. in order to get a certain effect particular features are heightened and distorted and others suppressed altogether, until a man entirely different from the real man, and yet all the time with. a kind of poignant re- semblance, is produced. Macaulay's essay on Clive lives, and will continue to live, in literature because the author was a man of genius. But we must never forget that when we read and thrill it is not about the real Clive. The figure before us is as essentially a work of art as, say, Shakespeare's Henry V. Happily, however, the Clive whom Sir George Forrest has drawn for us in his two volumes, full, we are glad to say, of the ipsissima verba Of hie • The gle 0/ Lord Clive. By Sir George Forrest, C.I.F.. 2 vols. London : Cassell and Co. [303. net.1

subject, is quite as vivid as Macaulay's sketch and infinitely more satisfying. Here we enjoy the form and features of a living man, and are not worried by the thunderous distortions and lambent exaggerations of the magician of History. The general impression which we get from Macaulay, and which he deliberately intended us to receive, is of a coarse and illiterate soldier of fortune, ill-bred and ill-read, but saved from the die- considerations of such a character by flashes not only of military genius but of statesmanship and of a true sense of patriotism.

Macaulay's Clive has the coarseness of grain and vulgarity of the conventional Nabob. No one would gather from the essay that here was a man who in his writing was not only scrupulously careful of the art of composition, but possessed a natural felicity of style as well as an essential power of conveying to paper that passion with which his whole nature vibrated.

There is hardly any man of action who has contrived to put the thrill of emotion into his phrases that Clive did. It is on record that Chatham, who listened to one of Olive's speeolies, declared that" it was one of the most finished pieces of eloquence he had over heard in the House of Commons." But in truth this declaration was hardly wanted. We have only to read the speech in question to recognize its extraordinary force and fascination. There is no excuse for any suggestion that Clive was indebted to the help of others in the composition of his speeches, for his letters and

despatches, of which happily we have a vast supply, are filled with passages equally eloquent, pregnant, and " luolferous." Take as

an example Olive's description of the physical miseries from which he suffered. "How miserable I am," he wrote in one of his last letters to Henry Strachey, his" most devoted comrade and friend " ; "I have a disease which makes life insupportable, but which my doctors tell me won't shorten it one hour." These are words that pierce the heart and are somehow clothed with an emotional force beyond their functions and their offices—their more grammatical meaning. Take again the phrase, in one of Olive's later letters to his father in which, when asking to be remembered to his mother

"in the most affectionate manner," he adds : "She has acted a great part in life." He goes on to speak of "the uniformity of her conduct with regard to her children" as her special virtue. Could

a mother want higher praise more nobly expressed ? Were there uniformity of conduct in all parents, how many family tragedies should we avert! Take again these .eords in a letter to Strachey written in 1772, words which not only move us, but have at this

moment a peculiar appropriateness for all vrhb desire that Clive's work for the Empire shall endure : "I will not patiently stand by and see a great Empire, acquired by great abilities, perseverance and resolution; lost by ignorance and indolence." May the Houses of Parliament remember these words when they discuss the Montagu Report !

Here are words taken from Olive's address to the officers who in the First Mutiny asked for more money—words which sting like a blood-knot on a lash : "You have stormed no town, and, found the money there; neither did you find it in the plains of Plessey.'

But let us not for a moment suppose that Clive in his letters was always riding the high horse. He could be as lively as he could be severe. We find him, for example, speaking of his chief rival in the East India Company's Directorate as "Sir Hannibal Hot Pot." That delightful phrase is contained in a letter to Orme the historian, whom Clive kept well supplied not only with letters, memoranda,

and speeches, but with plans and drawings. It is indeed one of Sir George Forrest's most memorable discoveries that Clive was the power behind. the throne of the English Thucydides. No doubt Onne was endowed by nature with a very remarkable gift of style, but it is extraordinarily interesting to find how much he owed to the direct inspiration of Clive. Fastidious as was Orme in the written word, he would often adopt whole pages of Olive's "material to serve" with only the slightest of verbal alterations. All that minute history of the early transactions at Aroot and, on the come of Coromandel is now seen, to have been derived directly from the principal actor, Captain Clive. Yee no one ever detected that the

stately march of Orme's Inimitable historic prose—a prose medium essentially finer than that of either Gibbon or Johnson—was diluted, by some inferior strain. Who would gather from Macaulay that the subject of his essay was a man who could not only think end act, but write as well as—in our opinion, a great deal better than—the great Chatham himself ?

While thanking Sir George Forrest for his noble contribution to our historical literature, we desire to ask of him further favours.

In our opinion, he would be doing little less than fulfilling an imperative public duty if he would make a very full seleotion of all the best of Clive's letters, deapatehes, public memoranda, and speeches, including the whole Report of Olive's evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons, and publish them, not in exttacte, but verbatim, with such current annotations and expiate ationa as might be required.. The book would be not only a magnificent monument to Olive's genius, but would be of immense practical value to all whose duty it is to carry on our rule in India till such time as the various peoples of that groat fragment of the Asian Continent shall have reached that, social and political

homogeneity whieh will enable them to govern themselves. Finally, such a book as we suggest (it would have to be a book of many volumes unless a great deal of good material were sacrificed) would be of special use in that school of English, or "English Greats," which has been recommended in these columns to the consi :eration of our elder Universities.

In striving to show how greatly a full and adequate Life of Clive was required, and fel expressing our gratitude to Sir George Forrest for relieving us of the incubus of the Macaulay caricature, or rather let us say for allowing us, while still enjoying the brilliancy of the caricature,to see the real man behind it, we have unfortunately left ourselves very little space in which to deal with the general course of the narrative, or to discuss the great amount of fresh matter which it contains. Our consolation must be that the book is so full of new light, both on the character of Clive and on Indian affairs, that it would be hopeless to attempt any detailed analysis. All we shall try to do is to indicate one or two points in regard to which Sir George Forrest has put his readers under a special obligation. His account of the intricate military and diplomatic operations between us, the Native rulers of Southern India, and the French is surprisingly clear, considering the complications of the subject. Though he in no way lays himself out to be sensational or dramatic, his story of the siege of Arcot is full of the spirit of romance. More important, and in many ways more difficult of accomplishment, are the lifelike, and we believe perfectly fair, pictures which we obtain of those two hitherto somewhat mysterious and shadowy figures, Omichund and Nuncomar. If any proof were needed that Clive behaved quite properly in regard to Omichund and the Red Treaty, it is to be found in the volumes before us. We believe that the verdict of sensible and honourable men who take the trouble to master the facts, and do not jump to conclusions, must always be that which Clive himself gave to the House of Commons in looking back on these transactions. He not only showed no remorse for what he had done, but with his usual boldness and sincerity declared that if the thing had got to be done over again he would act exactly as he had acted. No one can read the full narrative without feeling that, at the very worst, Clive was splendide menclax. To have yielded to a blackmailer such as Omichund on a punctilio would have been not merely futile but cruel, for it would certainly have involved the lives of the Englishmen in the hands of the Nabob. Admiral Watson yielded, or rather half yielded, to the punctilio, but was saved from the consequences of his moral timiditrby Olive's boldness and willingness to take the whole responsibility on his own brave shoulders. Clive indeed in his willingness to counteract the treachery and deceit of Omichund, cuts a very much better figure than the fastidious Watson, who " would not play false and yet would falsely win."

The name of Nuncomar comes to us illuminated by the dramatic eloquence of two of our greatest rhetoricians and men of letters, Burke and Macaulay. Yet neither of them told us, Burke probably because he did not want to spoil his case and Macaulay because he was ignorant, that Nuncomar long before he was caught out in an act of peeulative forgery had played a very tortuous, not to say treacherous, part both before and after the overthrow of Surajah Dowlah. He was quite as much the child of lies and deceit as Omichund, and even more treacherous.

Those who want to satisfy themselves in regard to the allegations of pecuniary corruption made against Clive cannot do better than study Sir George Forrest'e book, where the whole of the facts are given without disguise. Happily this was an easy task, for Clive, not out of any calculated candour, but because it was part of his nature and his system, never made any secret about his pecuniary gains. Here indeed he showed not only good sense but good morals, for corruption never finds any wings so suited to its flight as those of secrecy. Where secrecy is abandoned corruption in the worst sense cannot flourish. It may have been wrong of the East India Company not earlier to have made rules about the taking of presents from natives. But the honest student of history viewing the facts in regard to Clive will give the same verdict which was given by Parliament. It will be remembered that the House of Commons passed a resolution setting forth the fact that Clive did" about the time of the deposing of Surajah Dowlah, the Nabob of Bengal, and the establishing of Meer Jaffier on the musnud," obtain 1234,000, but added to this statement of undoubted and admitted fact "that Robert Lord Clive did, at the same time, render great and meritorious services to this country."

Though accident gave Clive so vast a fortune, he was in no cense an avaricious man. Crashaw, in perhaps the most beautiful conceit in our or any language, said of the young poet disappointed in love, "He catehed at love, and fined his hands with bays." Of Clive we might say with equal truth, "He catched at power, and filled his hands with gold." Power was what he cared for, both for himself and for the Company. And here it is not out ef place to point out that in a dissolute age, and subject to all the temptations of Asian exile, Clive appears to have maintained throughout his life the highest moral standard. He was as good and as devoted a husband as he was a son. Nothing could have been more simply lender, natural, and affectionate than his letters to Lady Clive.

He was even free from the vice of drunkenness, in the eighteenth century hardly considered, a vice. In his dealings with the natives he was never oppressive, never cruel, never vindictive, but always respectful, courteous, and dignified. Any thought of personal revenge or of persecuting his opponents with malignity was far from his nature. Again, though he could hit hard and speak plainly, he always avoided the language of personal insult. It was not in his nature to use it. In many cases one cannot but be surprised at the way in which he forgave and forgot. For example, though he exposed and ruined Omichund, he appears to have taken a kindly interest in repairing the health of the broken traitor. He even forgave Meer Jaffier, who, in spite of the fact that Clive had placed him on the throne, was quite willing to have betrayed his friend andr patron. Finally, Clive would never listen for a moment to any of the Machiavellian suggestions for getting rid of " inconvenient people" by the methods prevalent in an Oriental Court. Proposals of this kind always roused his fiercest indignation.

We have marked in these volumes some thirty passages for quotation, all of them affording proofs of the extreme interest of Sir George Forrest's book. We have only space, however, for one or two. We will choose not those which may be described as sensational in ability, but those which are good examples of Olive's statesmanship and grasp of great principles. When the "young Nawab " was pressed by the invasion of the Shahzaclah, the eldest son of the Mogul, and. was on the point of paying blackmail, Clive, who was hurrying up to his support, wrote him two letters of admirable advice. The first contained the following passage :— "I would not have you think of coming to any terms with him, but proceed to take the necessary measures to defend your city to the last. On Monday, the last of this month, I shall take the field, and will have everything in readiness to march to your assistance if necessary. Rest assured that the English are your staunch and firm friends, and that they never desert a cause in which they have once taken a part."

Six days later he added :—

" I have just heard, a piece of intelligence, which I can scarce give credit to ; it is, that your Excellency is going to offer a sum of money to the King's son. If you do this, you will have Sujah-u- Dotvlah, the Mahrattas, and many more, corns from all parts to the confines of your country, who will bully you out of money, till you have none left in your treasury. If your Excellency should pursue this method, it will be furnishing the King's son with the means to raise forces, which, indeed, may endanger the loss of your country. What will be said, if the great Jaffier All Khan, Subah of this province, who oommands an army of sixty thousand men, should offer money to a boy who has scarce a soldier with him ? I beg your Excellency will rely on the fidelity of the English and of those troops which are attached to you."

Once more we pray our rulers to remeniber these words when we are in effect asked to destroy the fabric of our Indian Empire, not because we have something better to put in its place, but as a concession to political and constitutional blackmail applied at a moment when we are supposed to be weak. When Clive was in a tight place, as he often was, he realized that the time had come for special firmness and boldness, not for concessions which would lose all their grace and value because of the shadow of enforcement. He kept concessions for fortunate hours, not for those that were overcast.

Perhaps the best and most perfect letter by Clive that we can quote is that in which he closes the controversy with the half. mutinous officers who tried to extract a larger share of money after the battle of Plassey—the men at whose heads while they were mutinous he flung the rebuke quoted above as an example of style. When Clive stood firm these officers made a complete surrender. It was then, but not till then, that Clive showed his magnanimity :—

" GENTLEMEN,—I have ever been desirous of the love and good opinion of my officers, and have often pursued their interest in preference of my own. What passed the other day is now forgotten, and I shall always be glad of an opportunity of convincing you how

much I am, Gentlemen, Your most obedient, humble servant, As Sir George Forrest well says, it is a letter which illustrates " the generosity and manly sense of Olive's character." Clive, following - the Oriental fashion, was apt to end his letters with the phrase : "What can I say more ? " What can we say more, how can we end our review better than with this perfect example of epistolary eloquence?