Muse, for him!MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN
PART XVIII
"Have I not in my time heard lions roar? Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat? Have I not heard great ordnance in the field, And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies? Have I not in the pitched battle heard Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"
On returning to London I found the world in the "transition state." The spirit of the people was changed; the nature of the war was changed; the principle of the great parties in the legislature was changed. A new era of the contest had arrived; and, in the midst of the general perplexity as to the nature of the approaching events, every one exhibited a conviction, that when they came their magnitude would turn all the struggles of the past into child's play.
I, too, had my share in the change. I had now passed my public novitiate, and had obtained my experience of statesmanship on a scale, if too small for history, yet sufficiently large to teach me the working of the machinery. National conspiracy, the council-chamber, popular ebullition, and the tardy but powerful action of public justice, had been my tutors; and I was now felt, by the higher powers, to be not unfit for trust in a larger field. A seat in the English House of Commons soon enabled me to give satisfactory evidence that I had not altogether overlooked the character of the crisis; and, after some interviews with the premier, his approval of my conduct in Ireland was followed by the proposal of office, with a seat in the cabinet.
I had thus attained, in the vigour of life, a distinction for which hundreds, perhaps thousands, had laboured through life in vain. But mine was no couch of rosy prosperity. The period was threatening. The old days of official repose were past, never to return. The state of Europe was hourly assuming an aspect of the deepest peril. The war had hitherto been but the struggle of armies; it now threatened to be the struggle of nations. It had hitherto lived on the natural resources of public expenditure; it now began to prey upon the vitals of the kingdom. The ordinary finance of England was to be succeeded by demands pressing heavily on the existing generation, and laying a hereditary burden on all that were to follow. The nature of our antagonist deepened the difficulty. All the common casualties of nations were so far from breaking the enemy down, that they only gave him renewed power. Poverty swelled his ranks; confiscation swelled his coffers; bankruptcy gave him strength; faction invigorated his government; and insubordination made him invincible. In the midst of this confusion, even a new terror arose. The democracy of France, after startling Europe, had seemed to be sinking into feebleness and apathy, when a new wonder appeared in the political hemisphere, too glaring and too ominous to suffer our eyes to turn from it for a moment. The Consulate assumed the rule of France. Combining the fiery vigour of republicanism with the perseverance of monarchy, it now carried the whole force of the country into foreign fields. Every foreign capital began to tremble. The whole European system shook before a power which smote it with the force of a cannon-ball against a crumbling bastion. The extraordinary man who now took the lead in France, had touched the string which vibrated in the heart of every native of the soil. He had found them weary of the crimes of the democracy; he told them that a career of universal supremacy was open before them. He had found them degraded by the consciousness of riot and regicide; he told them that they were the chevaliers of the new age, and destined to eclipse the chevaliers of all the ages past. His Italian campaigns, by their rapidity, their fine combinations, and their astonishing success, had created a new art of war. He had brought them romantic triumphs from the land of romance. Day by day the populace of the capital were summoned to see pageants of Italian standards, cannon, and prisoners. Every courier that galloped through the streets brought tidings of some new conquest; and every meeting of the Councils was employed in announcing the addition of some classic province, the overthrow of some hostile diadem, or the arrival of some convoy of those most magnificent of all the spoils of war, the treasures of the Italian arts. France began to dream of the conquest of the world.
The contrast between her past calamities and her present splendour, powerfully heightened the illusion. France loves illusion; she has always rejoiced in glittering deceptions, even with the perfect knowledge that they were deceptions; and here stood the most dazzling of political charlatans, the great wonder-worker, raising phantoms of national glory even out of the charnel. The wrecks of faction, the remnants of the monarchy, and the corpses lying headless in the shadow of the guillotine, gave all semblance to the conception—France was a charnel. Her people, by nature rushing into extremes, wild and fierce, yet gallant and generous, had become at length conscious of the national fall in the eyes of Europe. They had been scandalized by the rudeness, the baseness, and the brutishness, of rabble supremacy. They gazed upon their own crimsoned hands and tarnished weapons with intolerable disgust; and it was in this moment of depression that they saw a sudden beam of military renown shot across the national darkness. After so long defeat that it had extinguished all but the memory of her old triumphs, France was a conqueror; after a century of helpless exhaustion, she had risen into almost supernatural vigour; after a hundred years, scarcely marked by a single victory, her capital rang with the daily sound of successful battles against the veterans of Frederick and Maria Theresa; after lingering for generations in the obscurity so bitter to the popular heart, France had been suddenly thrown into the broadest lustre of European sovereignty. The world was changed; and the limits of that change offered only a more resistless lure to the popular passion, for their being still indistinct to the keenest eye of man.
But our chief struggle was at home, and the reaction of our foreign disasters came with terrible weight upon a cabinet already tottering. We saw its fate. Days and nights of the most anxious consultation, could not relieve us from the hourly increasing evidence, that the Continent was on the verge of ruin. The voice of Opposition, reinforced by the roar of the multitude, could no longer be shut out by the curtains of the council-chamber. Fox, always formidable, was never more confident and more popular, than when he made the House ring with prophecies of national downfall. His attacks were now incessant. He flung his hand-grenades night after night into our camp, and constantly with still greater damage. We still fought, but it was the fight of despair. Pitt was imperturbable; but there was not one among his colleagues who did not feel the hopelessness of calling for public reliance, when, in every successive debate, we heard the leader of Opposition contemptuously asking, what answer we had to the Gazette crowded with bankruptcy? to the resolutions of great bodies of the people denouncing the war? or to the deadly evidence of its effects in the bulletin which he held in his hand, announcing some new defeat of our allies; some new treaty of submission; some new barter of provinces for the precarious existence of foreign thrones?
In all my recollections of public life, this was the period of the deepest perplexity. The name of the great minister has been humiliated by those who judge of the past only by the present. But then all was new. The general eye of statesmanship had been deceived by the formal grandeur of the continential sovereignties. They had lain untouched, like the bodies of their kings, with all their armour on, and with every feature unchanged; and such they might have remained for ages to come, had not a new force broken open their gilded and sculptured shrines, torn off their cerements, and exposed them to the light and air. Then a touch extinguished them; the armour dropped into dust; the royal robes dissolved; the royal features disappeared; and the whole illusion left nothing but its moral behind.
It can be no dishonour to the memory of the first of statesmen, to acknowledge that he had not the gift of prophecy. Europe had never before seen a war of the people. The burning passions, rude vigour, and remorseless daring of the multitude, were phenomena of which man knows no more than he knows of the materials of destruction which lie hid in the central caverns of the globe, and which some new era may be suffered to develope, for the new havoc of posterity. Even to this hour, I think that the true source of revolutionary triumph has been mistaken. It was not in the furious
