BOOKS.
GEORGE CANNING.* MR. lianniorr blunts, if he does not altogether disarm, criticism by his modest prefatory note. In it be expresses the desire that his pages " should be read less as a biography of Canning than as an ` appreciation' of his policy, and especially of his foreign policy," adding : " they contain a transcription and expansion of the notes of a lecture delivered at Cambridge, and I have not always been careful to eliminate, though I have not striven to preserve, the original lecture
• George Canning and hie Tiraa: a Political Study. By J. A. B. Marriott. London John Murray. Dal form." We hope we shall not be considered pedantic or captious if we say that Canning is the last person in the world in treating of whom such an apology can be effec- tively urged. " Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat" is faulty logic, but it may be fairly contended that no one should discuss a man in whom the literary instinct was strong without having strong literary sympathies. If this is true in general, it is peculiarly true of Canning, who occupies an almost unique position amongst those English statesmen who not only distinguished themselves in action, but said things that are and will be remembered for their manner as well as their matter. Yet Mr. Marriott does not hesitate to dismiss Canning's contributions to the Anti-Jacobin as having " no special distinction." It all depends what you mean by " distinc- tion." In his prose Canning was, judged by modern standards, inclined to be a little over-ornate. But his verse was unquestion- ably marked by the " antiseptic of style." Again and again be said things, if not with supreme finality, at least in a way that has ensured their continuous vitality for a hundred years. Even Mr. Marriott himself, with strange but commendable inconsistency, speaks of the " Friend of Humanity " as " a specimen of political and social satire of the highest order,— of an order which, however rare, is never out of date," and admits the existence of some admirable passages in the " New Morality." For the rest, Mr. Marriott's claims to considera- tion as a literary critic are not a little discounted by his care- less and inaccurate citation of the famous rhyming despatch to Sir Charles Bagot, and his mutilation of the " Anacreontic" on "Brother Hiley " and "Brother Bragge." In a work of such modest dimensions it would have been, on the face of it, better to omit all mention of Canning's literary achievements than to treat them so inadequately and perfunctorily as Mr. Marriott has done. But such omission is impossible. Though Canning's contributions to satiric literature only formed an episode in his career, they are indispensable to the formation of a just estimate of the politician. Disfigured as they are by wanton personalities, and unequal in execution, as might be expected in effusions dashed off with the rapidity of an improvisation, they cannot be pronounced unprincipled, seeing that, personalities apart, certain underlying principles found in them exceedingly clear, if somewhat truculent, expression. Canning's ridicule of what may be called political Jellybyism not only served its purpose at the moment, but it is peculiarly deserving of remembrance at the present time. Its sincerity was greater than the intellectual arrogance, the touch of maliciousness, by which it was too often marred. And this quality of freshness prompts one to notice how extraordinarily modern, in spite of certain literary conventions, Canning's. squibs are. At one moment one is reminded of Mr. Andrew Lang ; at another of Calverley ; at another of Mr. Owen Seaman. In a sense, Canning and Frere are the fathers of the best modern literary burlesque, in which culture is allied to irresponsibility, and classical allusions are found in incon- gruous juxtaposition with sheer colloquialism.
This modernity of expression, which has kept so much of the Anti-Jacobin in constant currency and provided countless writers of burlesque with a convenient formula, was combined in Canning with a modernity of outlook in regard to Welt- politik which is his chief title to enduring fame. It is curious that Mr. Marriott in his account of Canning's conversion to the views of Pitt makes no mention of the strange story told by Sir Walter Scott of Godwin's visit and the offer of the dictatorship of the English Jacobins ; but whatever the determining cause of his conversion, no one can doubt that Canning deserved far better of his country as an educator of the Tory party than if he had cast in his lot with the im- practicable extremists. His position was by no means enviable, suggesting an adaptation of the late Lord Morris's famous explanation of the Irish question as the inevitable outcome of a quick-witted people being governed by a stupid one. He was, for reasons which by no means redounded to his dis- credit, never a persona grata at Court; he never inspired affection in his fellow-Ministers, who resented the methods by which he sought to secure the removal of inefficient colleagues, and dreaded the lash of a tongue which, as Scott said, " fetched away both skin and flesh and would have pene- trated the hide of a rhinoceros," making him " the terror of that species of orators called the Yelpers." Even when all allowance is made for the natural distrust excited in mediocre
minds for commanding ability reinforced by intellectual dis- dain, there remains an almost overwhelming consensus of contemporary opinion that, however desirable his aims may have been, he was overprone to promote their fulfilment by
subterranean means. The wonder is that in his isolation he achieved so much, for more often than not he not only initiated a policy, but forced it upon an unwilling Cabinet. This opposition was acute during his first tenure of the seals of the Foreign Office, yet be carried his colleagues with him in the bold counterstroke to the Treaty of Tilsit, which led to the bombardment of Copen- hagen, and in his refusal to yield to the cry for abandoning the Peninsula after Corunna. But Canning's aureum quin- quennium came at the end of his career,—after a long interval of opposition and subordinate employment, due in great measure to his own impatience and faults of temper. It was then that he stood forth almost single-handed as the opponent of the reactionary absolutism embodied in the policy of Metternich, and, as Mr. Marriott fairly contends, inaugurated a new era in English policy by his resolute resistance to the principle of concerted intervention in the domestic affairs of independent States.
Of Canning's memorable conflict with the Holy Alliance, and the step which made him in a sense the " only begetter " of the Monroe doctrine, it is not necessary to speak ; but Mr. Marriott does well to emphasise his conspicuous services to Portugal and Greece. The passage in which lie analyses the aims and tendency of Canning's foreign policy shows Mr. Marriott at his best, and may be quoted at length :-
"But almost the whole of Canning's official life was spent at the Foreign Office ; and it is on the impulse and direction which he gave to our foreign policy that his reputation must stand or fall. As a Foreign Minister, Canning belongs emphatically to the nineteenth century. During his tenure of office under the Duke of Portland (1807-1609) he gave a taste of his quality, but his energies were necessarily concentrated upon the struggle with Napoleon, and his efforts were hampered and neutralised by in- competent colleagues. Not until his accession to power, in 1822, had he full opportunity to display his genius for foreign policy on a sufficient scale. In a sense, larger, perhaps, than he under- stood, he called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old. His rivals and contemporaries among the statesmen of Europe belonged to the old era; he himself belonged to the new. It was his conspicuous merit to have perceived and realised that the settlement laboriously evolved at Vienna could not last ; that the diplomatic edifice was built upon a shifting sand; that its basis was a mere negation of forces and ideas which, despite the diplomatists, were bound to have free play. More than this, Canning understood that many of the ideas which had been evoked by the revolutionary upheaval were not in substance and reality destructive, but essentially con- structive, tending to edification, not dilapidation. Of these ideas incomparably the most potent was that of nationality. A common creed and a common tongue ; a common race and a common history : all this was involved in the pregnant idea of nationality ; and this was the force which, contemned and derided at Vienna, which, repressed by the Holy Allies, was destined to assert itself in the coming age as the essentially constructive and conservative element in European politics. Nationality, in fact, has proved to be, in the main, a unifying and consolidating principle in the nineteenth century. This truth Canning intuitively grasped. To his contemporaries he appeared as a friend to revolution. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a thorough believer in the hierarchical system, social and political, and he desired to maintain the established order. But he perceived much which was hidden from statesmen like Metternich and Alexander, still more from puny despots like Ferdinand VII. and Bombe ; he understood that the old pre-revolutionary order was gone, never to return, and that the international system of Europe must henceforward be based on something better and bolder than negation and repression. Canning did not give to English foreign policy an entirely new direction. Castlereagh, though lack- ing in executive vigour, was working on the right lines. But with his firmer grasp and his wider outlook he infused into its administration a new spirit, and won for his country the respect of the Continental Powers in a measure rarely attained before or since. That Great Britain should occupy a commanding place in the councils of Europe was with Canning an article of faith. At the time of his death, in 1827, she enjoyed it beyond dispute."
To the criticisms already passed we have to add that these pages are disfigured by not a few inaccuracies and redundancies. The name " Ackermann " is spelt in two different ways (pp. 126, 133); the date August 21st, 1790, on p. 20 is obviously wrong ; the King of Portugal is described as John VI., John VII., and John IV. in the space of three pages (pp. 110-12) ; the last sentence on p. 14 is a repetition of that on a previous page; and quotation marks are missing on pp. 18 and 30. Such blemishes, pardon- able in a large work, are more noticeable in a volume of a hundred and fifty pages, and argue inadequate revision. Mr. Marriott, in short, has produced a readable rather than a scholarly sketch. We have to thank him, however, for recalling the remarkable fact that there is no biography of Canning at once adequate in scale and critical in tone. The brilliant little volume published in the " English Worthies" series in 1887 makes one regret that so accomplished and well equipped a writer as Mr. Frank Hill was not tempted to expand his sketch into a full-length portrait.
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