TH

WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM

JANUARY, 1834

NOTE ON THE ESSAY

HE essay on William Pitt is in form and substance one of the best of Macaulay's Essays. Macaulay's amazing gusto for Parliamentary history and his power of vigorous, although overcharged portraiture are nowhere better exemplified. Macaulay was far more conversant with the details, far more sympathetic to the spirit of the eighteenth than of the seventeenth century. Among the English statesmen of the eighteenth century none afforded a theme more suitable to Macaulay's bold and brilliant rhetoric than William Pitt. With all his waywardness and affectation in little things, in great things Pitt was a simple and majestic character, sincere, brave, impetuous, a contemner of sordid gains, greedy only of power which he employed to exalt his country, and of the applause with which she repaid his services. Other public men have been more steadily wise and constantly successful; but Pitt's first famous administration is still the most glorious in two hundred years of Parliamentary government.

The essay is not indeed faultless either as biography or as history. The accomplished author of Britain and Her Rivals somewhat unkindly taxes Macaulay with an instinctive preference for commonplace men and commonplace movements which rendered him unsympathetic with irregular genius like that of Pitt. "He betrays a perpetual distrust; his admiration has the air of being extorted; his censure has in it a note of satisfaction." He is more deeply impressed by Pitt's failure as a Parliamentary politician than by his success as a temporary dictator. We may allow some weight to this censure and more to the observation that Macaulay, whilst dilating upon every Parliamentary incident which preceded the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, scarcely helps the reader to understand how much was then at stake for England; nothing less than the dominion of North America and of India. Since the commencement of the reign of George II. both branches of the House of Bourbon had drawn together with the view of asserting their colonial and commercial interests against those of England. Walpole and the Pelhams had done little to guard against this danger, and the war VOL. II.-1

with Spain, which the people had forced upon the Government in 1740, had decided nothing. Pitt saw that a decision by force of arms could no longer be avoided. He also saw that the war must be chiefly a naval war. He subsidised the King of Prussia it is true, and sent a contingent of British troops to Prince Ferdinand, the better to divert the energies of France to the Continent, but it was upon the navy that he lavished his care and the resources of the treasury. Aided no doubt by the incompetence of Louis XV. and his ministers, Pitt gave the English admirals an overpowering superiority which they employed so well that the French navy was almost entirely destroyed and the French possessions beyond the sea were almost all conquered. It was in this clear conception of the objects and character of the war and in this mighty concentration of force upon the critical point, not in the designing of operations in detail, that Pitt approved himself so great a minister, and it was here that Macaulay failed to do him justice or to make the reader perceive his full superiority to rival statesmen.

For the materials of his sketch Macaulay was little indebted to the book which he professed to review. Mr. Thackeray's Life is a prolix, pompous and uninforming work. But Macaulay owed much not only as to facts, but also in suggestion to Horace Walpole's Letters and his Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second. Sir James Stephen has illustrated from the essay on Warren Hastings the wonderful skill with which Macaulay could transform his materials, the slight but sure touches with which he could repaint the picture originally drawn by a very ordinary artist. Walpole, indeed, was no ordinary writer. He was as uniformly interesting as Macaulay and perhaps more varied. But Walpole's manner was altogether different from Macaulay's manner. To appropriate the substance of a very clever author is probably harder than to appropriate the substance of a dull one. In order to show how Macaulay succeeded in this attempt and made what has already pleased us in Walpole's pages please us as much in his own, but please us differently, I have quoted from Walpole in the notes to this essay much more freely than from any of the authors on whom Macaulay drew for his earlier historical studies.