The Glory Of English Prose Henry Grattan And Macaulay byColeridge, Stephen
My Dear Antony,
Some of the most eloquent orators in the world have been
Irishmen, and among them Henry Grattan was supreme.
The Irish Parliament in the later half of the eighteenth century
frequently sat spell-bound under the magic of his voice.
In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved by his amazing
eloquence a great National Revolution in Ireland. But eighteen
years later all that he had fought for and achieved was lost in the
Act of Union. In these days I suppose few will be found to defend
the means whereby that Act was passed; but the public assertions
that the people of Ireland were in favour of it wrung from Grattan
the following cry of indignation and wrath:—
"To affirm that the judgment of a nation is erroneous may
mortify, but to affirm that her judgment against is
for; to assert that she has said ay when she has
pronounced no; to affect to refer a great question to the
people; finding the sense of the people, like that of the
parliament, against the question, to force the question; to affirm
the sense of the people to be for the question; to affirm
that the question is persisted in, because the sense of the people
is for it; to make the falsification of the country's sentiments
the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of the Union; to affirm
that her parliament, constitution, liberty, honour, property, are
taken away by her own authority,—there is, in such artifice,
an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility, that can best be
answered by sensations of astonishment and disgust, excited on this
occasion by the British minister, whether he speaks in gross and
total ignorance of the truth, or in shameless and supreme contempt
for it.
"The constitution may be for a time so lost; the
character of the country cannot be so lost. The ministers of the
Crown will, or may, perhaps, at length find that it is not so easy
to put down for ever an ancient and respectable nation, by
abilities, however great, and by power and by corruption, however
irresistible; liberty may repair her golden beams, and with
redoubled heat animate the country; the cry of loyalty will not
long continue against the principles of liberty; loyalty is a
noble, a judicious, and a capacious principle; but in these
countries loyalty, distinct from liberty, is corruption, not
loyalty.
"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against
the principles of liberty. Connexion is a wise and a profound
policy; but connexion without an Irish Parliament is connexion
without its own principle, without analogy of condition; without
the pride of honour that should attend it; is innovation, is peril,
is subjugation—not connexion.
"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against
the principle of liberty.
"Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the
preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire; but, without
union of hearts—with a separate government, and without a
separate parliament, identification is extinction, is dishonour, is
conquest—not identification.
"Yet I do not give up the country—I see her in a swoon,
but she is not dead—though in her tomb she lies helpless and
motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her
cheeks a glow of beauty—
"Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there."
"While a plank of the vessel sticks together, I will not leave
her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light
bark of his faith, with every new breath of wind—I will
remain anchored here—with fidelity to the fortunes of my
country, faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall."
Of another character, but not less admirable than his eloquence
in the Senate, was Grattan's achievement with the pen. His
description of the great Lord Chatham lives as one of the most
noble panegyrics—it not the most noble—in the world. No
writer, before or since, has offered anyone such splendid homage as
this—that he never sunk "to the vulgar level of the
great."
"The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached
him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character
had the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty,
and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his
presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved
from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of
vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk
him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive,
and impracticable, his object was England,—his ambition was
fame; without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he
made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand
he smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the
democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his
schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but
Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these
schemes were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the
suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and enlightened
by prophecy.
"The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and
indolent—those sensations which soften, and allure, and
vulgarise—were unknown to him; no domestic difficulties, no
domestic weakness reached him; but, aloof from the sordid
occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came
occasionally into our system to counsel and decide.
"A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so
authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled
at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality. Corruption
imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and
talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and much of the ruin
of his victories—but the history of his country, and the
calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.
"Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his
eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous,
familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive
wisdom—not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid
conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and
sometimes the music of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct
the understanding through the painful subtilty of argumentation;
nor was he, like Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion, but
rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the
flashings of his mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but
could not be followed.
"Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he
was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he
concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon
many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence, but even
then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with
fatal, unapproachable activity.
"Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could
create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of
slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with unbounded
authority; something that could establish or overwhelm empire, and
strike a blow in the world that should resound through its
history."
Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years later, in 1844, another
great English writer, Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage
upon the great Lord Chatham in the Edinburgh
Review:—
"Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot
which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other
end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests
there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and
Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great
citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable
graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and, from above, his
effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face and
outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl
defiance at her foes.
"The generation which reared that memorial of him has
disappeared. The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate
judgments which his contemporaries passed on his character may be
calmly revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of
vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors, will
yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose bones
lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless and none a
more splendid name."
It is a great race, Antony, that can produce a man of such a
character as Chatham, and also writers who can dedicate to him such
superb tributes as these.
Macaulay's prose has been much criticised as being too near to
easy journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of
English; but this much must be recognised to his great
credit—he never wrote an obscure sentence or an ambiguous
phrase, and his works may be searched in vain for a foreign idiom
or even a foreign word. He possessed an infallible memory, absolute
perspicuity, and a scholarly taste. He detested oppression wherever
enforced, and never exercised his great powers in the defence of
mean politics or unworthy practices.
Such a writer to-day would blow a wholesome wind across the
tainted pools of political intrigue.
We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, clean writer, who
was an honour to letters.