B 0 Q K S.

CHATHAM : HIS EARLY LIFE AND ' CONNEXIONS.*

LORD ROSEBERY'S book on the younger Pitt was a brilliant study, but this long-awaited examination of the sources of the elder Pitt's character is more brilliant still. The grace and wit are more abundant. The power of compressing the characters of those who tread the well-peopled political stage into a few words—almost epigrammatic, but more truthful than epigram—is astonishing. Every Life of Chatham is an attempt to explain an enigma, it is the essence of enigmas that one should never know whether the explanation is correct; therefore in a sense all biographies of Chatham must fail to be satisfying. Lord Rosebery laments the failure of the biographies, and no one will dispute with him as to the fact. There is the flat biography by Thackeray (not W. M. Thackeray); the Industrious work of von Ruville, who has turned a sparkling into a still wine; and for the rest there are the excellent brief study by Mr. Frederic Harrison and the immortal essays of Macaulay. The study and essays are of course the best, but they are not biographies. The brotherhood of biographers have with one accord fought rather shy of Chatham. Lord Rosebery has not attempted a biography; he has only investigated Chatham's early life in order to ascertain how it illuminates the later celebrated years. The result is• beyond question a flood of light. We beg Lord Rosebery to continue the work. If with all the clues in his hand which the hitherto unavailable information of private papers has given Mtn he will write 'next of those few years in Chatham's life which were the glory of England and one of the most signal periOds in history, he will beyond doubt produce by far the most satisfactory Life of Chatham ever written. As it is, one can say of his explanation of the • Chatham: hie Early Life and Connections. By Lord Bosebery. London : Arthur L. Humphreys. [12s. net.] enigma that if it be not demonstrably correct, it at all events satisfies all the conditions. The Chatham of the famous period was in his bearing a magnificent actor—Garrick used to say that he could have exceeded all on the stage—he seemed unable to put one foot before the other, for all the gout which 'intermittently tortured him, without stateliness ; every motion of his hand was a fine gesture ; his clothes were a ceremony. He was a superhtiman being, and how can one explain him P One would have expected an extraordinarily icy and unreal youth to have led to such a manhood. But there history failed us. Before Lord Rosebery's book was published little was known of Chatham's youth. As Lord

Rosebery says :—

" Born of a turbulent stock, he is crippled by gout at Eton and Oxford, then launched into a cavalry regiment, and then into Parliament. For eight years he is groom-in-waiting to a prince. Then he holds subordinate office for nine years more. Then he suddenly flashes out, not as a royal attendant or a minor plaoeman, but as the people's darling and the champion of the country. In obscure positions he has become the first man in Britain, which he now rules absolutely for four years in a continual blase of triumph. Then he is sacrificed to an intrigue, but remains the supremo statesman of his country for five years more. Then he becomes Prime Minister amid general acclamation ; but in an instant he shatters his own power, and retires, distempered if not mad, into a cell. At last he divests himself of office, and recovers his reason ; he lives for nine years more, a lonely, sublime figure, but awful to the last, an incalculable force."

Lord Rosebery is able to show from his new sources of information that Chatham's youth was not at all the bizarre thing which would seem to suit with the demeanour of his maturity. The young man was capable of strong family

affection, and fell in and out of love as quickly as other youngsters. Why, then, the change which turned him into a terrifying and incalculable force, and which forbade intimacy

even while it summed itself up into sublimity? Lord Rosebery conceives that he deliberately assumed a mask for purposes of his own, but that it was not a mask prepared for him by his native character. This theory, as we have said, satisfies the facts. The new information which Lord Rosebery has used for drawing his picture comes from three quarters : MSS. in the possession of Mr.

Bevill Fortescue (to whom the book is dedicated) at Drop- more, Henry Fox's papers, and the writings of Lord Camel.

ford, Chatham's nephew, in 1781. Chatham is to be under- stood only by a knowledge of the Pitt family. What a caldron of family feuds and antipathies is revealed ! Chatham's grandfather was Governor Pitt, an illicit trader in the East Indies, whose inconvenient exploits were ended by hoisting him into a position of responsibility, where he "ranged himself," as the French say. The Governor denounced his wife with characteristic ferocity for some indiscretion, which is not explained, and probably would not justify a fragment of the ferocity if it were, and his family, true offspring of such a sire, fought like harpies over his estate when he died :—

" The harsh passions of the Governor and the petulant violence of his heirs seem so outrageous and uncontrolled as to verge on actual insanity. Shelburne explicitly states that 'there was a great deal of madness in the family.' Every indication confirms this statement. What seemed in the Governor brutality and excess, frequently developed in his descendants into something little if at all short of mental disorder. We thus trace to their source the germs of that haughty, impossible, anomalous character, distempered at times beyond the confines of reason, which made William so difficult to calculate or comprehend."

In his rough way the Governor showed his sagacity, or it may

be some signs of grace, in choosing his grandson William Pitt, the future Chatham, for particular favour. How William Pitt responded we cannot say, but we have here many examples of the way in which he bestowed his affection on his famous sister Ann Pitt. There is a series of letters from him to

" Nanny "; some of them were written from abroad, and of these several are in good French. Here is one of the letters, written, perhaps, when Ann Pitt feared that her brother might

separate himself from her by marriage :— "What shall I say to my Dearest Nanny for sinking into a tenderness below r dignity of her spirit and Genius? I sat down with a resolution to scold you off for a little Loving Fool, but Find myself upon examination your very own Brother and as fond of receiving such testimonies of the Excess of ye affection, as you are of Bestowing them : t'wou'd be more becoming ye Firmness of a. man to reprove you a little upon this occasion, and advise you to fortify your Mind against any such Separation as you so kindly apprehend, but as your fears are, I believe at present Groundless, I chru3e rather To talk to you hire an affectionate Freind than a

stern Philosopher and return every Fear you Feel for me with a most ardent wish for your Happiness."

Who can deny the charm of such letters, and who can easily fit them in with the starchiness of the letters written after the mask was assumed? Scarcely more easy is it to account for the quarrels between the brother and sister who betrayed

so much tenderness for one another. The last of the quarrels was never composed. But insanity in the sister may have accounted for many misunderstandings, if we are not to refer them to the dictatorial egoism of Pitt himself. At all events we now know that Pitt was not only capable of affection, but apt, and even demonstrative, in the expression of it ; and we cannot ourselves think that in any of the quarrels the blame was chiefly on the aide of him who was able to bold out such an olive-branch as this :—

" I have well weighed your letter, and deeply examined your picture of me, for some years past; and indeed, Sister, I still find something within, that firmly assures me I am not that thing which your interpretations of my life (if I can ever be brought to think them all your own) would represent me to be. I have infirmities of temper, blemishes, and faults, if you please, of nature, without end; but the Eye that can't be deceived must judge between us, whether that friendship, which was my very existence for so many years, could ever have received the least flaw, but from umbrages and causes which the quickest sensibility and tenderest jealousy of friendship alone, at first, suggested."

We cannot do justice here to the felicitous passages in

which Lord Rosebery describes Pitt's tremendous talents, contending with the exasperating sense of comparative inutility for so many years. From the moment that he entered Parliament he was afraid of no man, but soon every man was afraid of him. He was a ferret among rabbits. He flew at Walpole, Carteret, Newcastle, and Henry Fox in turn ; but the last and greatest opposition to his advance to be laid low was that of the King himself, who probably had never forgiven his satirical congratulations on the Prince of Wales's marriage. Pitt was in his forty-eighth year before he became a Secretary of State, and Lord Rosebery reflects upon the changes and chances of this mortal life which might easily have withheld from a man of that age the crowded great- ness of the years immediately following 1756. All through his long probation Pitt knew that he was, as he said of himself, the only man who could save England ; yet the opportunity was long delayed for him to win those resounding successes abroad of which no one can offhand remember the tale, so long is it. Was it not Horace Walpole who said that he had to ask every morning what new victory had been won for fear of missing one ? Frederick the Great recog- nised well the difference between Chatham and his pre- decessors in power. " Enfin," he said of England, " elle eat accouchee d'un homme." At the year 1756 Lord Rosebery leaves his subject. He has been unable to give us any new text of Chatham's speeches, but we cannot regret it. Oratory lies as much in the manner of the speaker as in the spoken word, and that can never be reproduced. We can scarcely disbelieve the traditions of the spell wrought by Chatham's oratory, yet the scanty text of his speeches that has come down to us explains little or nothing of that spell. In Chatham's day Parliamentary speeches were not reported ; some of the more famous figures attributed to him may have come from the imaginative memory of Dr. Johnson. But we have a priceless description by Lord Camelford of Chatham's oratory; it is better much than any comparison by Walpole of Chatham with Cicero and Demosthenes, and better than any report of the naked word :—

" In Parliament he never spoke but to the instant, regardless of whatever contradictions he might afterwards be reduced to, which he carried off with an effrontery without example. His eloquence was supported by every advantage that could unite in a perfect actor. Graceful in motion, his eye and countenance would have conveyed his feelings to the deaf. His voice was clear and melodious, and capable of every variety of inflection and modulation. His wit was elegant, his imagination inexhaustible, his sensibility exquisite, and his diction flowed like a torrent, impure often, but always varied and abundant. There was a style of conscious superiority, a tone, a gesture of manner, which was quite peculiar to him—everything shrunk before it ; and even facts, truth and argument were overawed and vanquished by it. On the other hand, his matter was never ranged, it had no method. He deviated into a thousand digressions, often reverted back to the same ground, and seemed sometimes like the lion to lash himself with his own tail to rouse his courage, which flashed in periods and surprised and astonished, rather than convinced by the steady light of reason. He was the very contrast of Lord Mansfield, his competitor in eloquence, who never appealed but to the conviction of the understanding, with an arrangement so

precise that every sentence was only the preparation for the force that the next was to obtain, and scarce a word could be taken away without throwing the whole argument into disorder; the other bore his hearers away by rapid flights into a region that looked down upon argument, and opposed the transport of feeling to conviction."

Here we must leave this fascinating book without having done more than hint at its contents. The numerous political figures tend sometimes to obscure our vision of Chatham himself, and yet we would not willingly spare one of these polished portraits. Walpole, Newcastle, Carteret, Henry Fox, Cobham, the Grenvilles, George II., Frederick Prince of Wales, and so on become amazingly real as Lord Rosebery defines each with piercing and flashing phrases. Once again we must beg Lord Rosebery to go on to the great years of the great Imperialist.