BOOKS.

LORD ROSEBERY'S "PITT."*

LORD ROSEBERY has the happy art of effective criticism, and has therefore made his short Life of Pitt a fascinating little book. He is more effective, indeed, in his criticism than in narrative or description. There is great vivacity, piquancy, and truth in his criticism, but he has not much of Carlyle's power of painting a vivid portrait with a few strong lines, or of Macaulay's of so connecting events as to give a dramatic effect to the political catastrophes he records. He can, however, put his finger on the picturesque sayings of others, as when he tells us, in describing George M.'s aversion to the Coali- tion Government, that when North and Fox "kissed hands, a humorous bystander predicted their early fall, for he observed George III. turn back his ears and eyes, just like the horse at Astley's when the tailor it determined to throw was mount- ing." Of his keen statesmanlike criticism, in speaking of George III. and Pitt and Fox, and also of Lord Fitzwilliam and Lord Wellesley, Lord Rosebery gives us ample evidence in this judicial little book ; but of touches like this, which bring the living character before our eyes, only too little. On the whole, he raises Pitt in our esteem, lowers Fox, Fitz- svilliam, and Wellesley, and leaves George III. exactly where ne was.

Of Pitt it has often been said that his character seemed to have been rather cast in a mould, than to have grown as char- acter usually grows, and Lord Rosebery's " Life " confirms the impression. What he was as a youth, he was as a man, and he seems neither to have gained nor lost much, except in • Pitt. By Lord Rosebery. " Twelve English Statesmen." London : Mac- millan and Co. physical power of endurance as his health failed. He always seems to have had his heart in the State rather than in any private interest. He was always stately, clear-headed, tenacious of his purposes, wise in his estimates of what really went to make a people strong and happy, and willing to accept partial defeat without either despair or pique. As Lord Rose- bery appears to admit, he did not compare favourably with his father as a great War Minister. He had not the eagle eye to discern military genius, and to seize on military oppor- tunity. All that he showed of the power of a great War Minister was that greatest of all gifts for such a purpose, tenacity, inability to believe that he could be beaten. Lord Rosebery does not discuss, however, what seems to us the most culpable act of Pitt's career, his deliberate forgery of French assiguats after the war between England and France had broken out, in order to bring France sooner to her knees as a bankrupt State. We are well aware that Ministers of great repute have justified the most cruel measures as resources of war, so long as they appear to be likely to bring the war to an end,—as, for instance, the poisoning of the wells of a country, if such a policy seemed likely to end the war. Pitt, as Doubleday, in his Life of Peel, has amply shown, must have taken this view, for in 1795 he took measures to forge a large number of French assignats; and a case on these forged assignats came before Lord Kenyon for his judgment, which fully confirms the other evidence which Mr. Doubleday has brought of Pitt's action in the matter. No doubt it is diffi-

cult to distinguish morally between different methods of de- stroying your enemy, and it is plausible to say that if you are bent on annihilating his resources, the more suddenly and

completely they are annihilated, the better. If a military ambush is legitimate (as no one who justifies any kind of war would deny), it is not easy to explain straight off why a financial ambush is not equally legitimate. But Pitt, we should have thought, would have been the first to see that the limits within which what is called honourable war is waged, are justified by the fact that they do much more to prevent a fatal deterioration of the human conscience, than to undermine the earnestness and efficiency of the combat. If once you give the reins to animosity, and justify everything without limit which tends to sharpen the edge of hostile purpose, war would lose its few redeeming features. You might as well dishonour the white flag, and render it impossible for foes to trust each other even under the protection of that flag, as justify without reserve every blow that could be struck at your foe. If forgery is justifiable as a measure of war, we do not see why assassination should not equally be justifiable as a measure of war. Yet Pitt would never have justified assassination. It seems to us that Lord Rosebery should not have concealed this blot on Pitt's policy as a War Minister. It shows that many of the reserves within which alone war is held to be honourably waged must have seemed to him blunders, and that he could not realise how infinitely less noxious is war within these limits, than mere unscrupulousness, mere eagerness to annihilate your foe by licit or illicit means. Pitt's humanity was great when he was thinking for the State which he ruled. It would seem that he did not perceive the necessity of keeping within definite restrictions the hostility he felt for the foes with whom he had to battle.

Lord Rosebery is at his best in some of his incidental criticisms. There is a touch, for instance, in the following passage on Pitt as a War Minister, Which seems to us to rise to a height of singularly temperate and carefully weighed eloquence such as really illuminates the subject of which he treats

These explanations and reserves are not intended to prove that Pitt was a great War Minister. In that respect it may be said that he has been much underrated without asserting that he was a born organiser of victory. He had dauntless spirit, he had unfailing energy, he evoked dormant resource, he inspired con- fidence ; but his true gifts were for peace. The signal qualities which he had shown in administration did not help him on this new stage. Unsupported and overweighted as he was, he could not in any case have succeeded. Nor in all probability could the greatest of War Ministers,—not Chatham, not Bismarck. It must be repeated again and again that, locked in a death-grapple with the French Revolution, he was struggling with something superhuman, immeasurable, incalculable. We do not read that the wisest and the mightiest in Egypt were able to avail, when the light turned to darkness and the rivers to blood."

That is the excuse, if excuse is to be found, for the attempt to stab France through the forgery of assignats. Pitt felt the preternatural character of the struggle, and was so carried

away by it that he himself used the same lawless weapons as he found his adversaries using. He borrowed a share of their malignity from the malignity of his Jacobin foes. Again, what can be abler than this criticism on Lord

Shelburne, and the contrast between him and the late Marquis of Lansdowne with which it concludes ?—

" Shelburne's good faith was always exemplary, but always in need of explanation. Some people seem to think that a reputation worse than his deserts unfairly encumbered his career. But, had his nam3 been as untainted as Bayard's, his style both in writing and speaking would have accounted for the most inveterate dis- trust. The English love a statesman whom they understand, or at least think that they understand. But who could understand Shelburne ? Whether from confusion of head or duplicity of heart, his utterances were the very seed of suspicion. The famous lines in the Roltiad arc merely the versification of a speech he actually delivered

A noble Duke affirms I like his plan, I never did, my Lords. I never can : Shame on the slanderous breath which dares instil That I who now oondemn advised the ill.

Plain word., thank Heaven, are always understood, I could approve, I mid—but not I would. Anxious to make the noble Duke content, My view was just to seem to give consent While all the world might see that nothing less was meant.'

In 1792 the King asked his advice, and Shelburne gave it in a memorandum which may be commended to any student of the man. It is a mere labyrinth of stilted ambiguities. Take again his speech on the Irish Union, from which both parties to that controversy to this day extract the strongest opinions in support of their respective views. Even his personal appearance, his sleek countenance and beady eye, imply the idea which is con- veyed to the ordinary Briton by the word Jesuitical : and the caricatures of the time represent the outer wall of Lansdowne House as a mere rampart to screen his plots. The pity of it is that his son, with much the same abilities, but richer by the warning, and aiming lower, achieved the position within the father's reach so exactly as to offer a reproachful contrast : the splendid noble, the patron of arts and letters, playing with rare dignity a public part, from duty rather than inclination ; sought, not seeking ; a strength, instead of a weakness, to his associates ; a pillar, not a quicksand."

Once more, what could be more piquInt, in spite of its extravagance, than the following criticism on the hard fate of a great Minister suddenly raised by the death of the head of his house to the Peerage,—a hard fate of which Lord Rosebery no doubt appreciates the bitterness to the full ?—

" While London was illuminating for the King's recovery, Lord Chatham lay mortally ill. So grave was his malady, that the hunters after Providence had fixed on Grenville as the new minister. For Lord Chatham's death, by the grim humour of our constitution, would have removed Pitt from the Commons to the Peers. In the prime of life and intellect, he would have been plucked from the governing body of the country, in which he was incomparably the most important personage, and set down as a pauper peer in the House of Lords. It would have been as if the Duke of Wellington in the middle of the Peninsular War had been transferred by the operation of constitutional law to the government of Chelsea Hospital."

Here and there, there is an error of taste, especially, we think, in the reference to Mr. Disraeli's very bad and rather vulgar joke about Pitt's last words,—a joke which is much more out of place in that tragic scene than any fly in amber ; but the only side of his work on which Lord Rosebery can be properly said to have failed, is in his power of historic narra- tive. He has, as we have already remarked, none of Lord Macaulay's skill in so narrating the progress of events as to excite the deepest interest of the reader. In criticism of character and policy, he is lucid, brilliant, and even epigram- matic, without losing a single shade of truthfulness. In impartiality of judgment, he is as great as in his power of so expressing that impartiality as to fascinate his readers. He has none of what we may call Hallam's redundant sobriety, —uninteresting moderation,—and yet, with all his keenness and wit, he is as judicial and moderate as Hallam himself. But in narrative he is not lively. His account of Pitt's vain struggle with his difficulties is as wise as it can be, but very far from being as impressive as it might be. In a short Life like this, such historical power is, however, not nearly so essential as power of criticism, and in power of criticism Lord Rosebery can hardly be surpassed. He makes his judgments as incisive and rememberable as they are just

and judicial.