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who never unbent save under the spell of Bacchus, it will be well to turn our attention to his social life in London and at Wimbledon. It cannot be said that he ever felt the full charm of London—
The quick forge and working-house of thought.
Brought up in the aristocratic seclusion of Hayes and Burton Pynsent, and in Pretyman’s prim coterie at Cambridge, he had no experience of the varied jostling life which the Londoner loves: and nature had not dowered him with the adaptability that makes up for the defects of training. Therefore he ever remained somewhat of a stranger in London. He was at home in Downing Street, and still more so in his own select club, or at Hayes, Wimbledon, or Holwood; but London never laid her spell on him, and his life was the poorer for it. He reminds us somewhat of that character in Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” who, though naive and jovial, when he entered his suburban retreat in Walworth Road and the mimic castle at the end of the garden, yet always fixed his features in chilling reserve when he went forth citywards. So, too, there were two Pitts, the austere man of affairs, and the lovable, delightful friend. London alone could have mixed up the two men and produced a sociable compound; but this was not to be.
Lincoln’s Inn and the law did little towards unbending him; though the story, recounted in the previous chapter, of his intellectual duel with Gibbon at a dinner in Lincoln’s Inn during the Gordon Riots shows that even then he had the power of keen and witty repartee which gained him the victory over an admitted autocrat of the table. Why these gifts did not draw him into general society is hard to say. Probably his shyness and awkwardness, on which Wilberforce lays so much stress, held him aloof.
Certainly the temptations of the West End had for him only a passing allurement. He felt no desire, besides having no means, to associate with the gambling cohuethat played at Brooks’s or Almack’s. His preference for bright and entertaining talkers naturally linked him
with those who had sufficient mental resources within themselves to scorn the usually dull cliques whose interest in life begins and ends with card tables. So far as opportunities had offered at Cambridge, he had cultivated conversation as a fine art; and now in the West End he found several of his University friends who welcomed him to a somewhat wider circle. It included about twenty-five young men, of whom the most noteworthy were Lords Althorpe, Apsley, G. Cavendish, Duncannon, Euston, Graham, and Lennox; as well as the following who were to become peers: Mr. Pratt (Marquis Camden), St. John (Lord St. John), Bridgeman (Lord Bradford), Morris Robinson (Lord Rokeby), W. Grenville (Lord Grenville), Pepper Arden (Lord Alvanley), and R. Smith (Lord Carrington).
That was the age when the bestowal of titles was one of the means of influence used by the Crown for the defence of its prerogatives. Wilberforce late in life remarked that more than half of the Peers had received their titles during his lifetime, and certainly, if we look at the circle of Pitt’s friends in 1781, we find that only he and seven others remained commoners. They were Bankes, Edwards (afterwards Sir Gerard Noel), Marsham, T. Steele, General Smith, Wilberforce and Windham, a friend of somewhat later date.
These and a few others, about thirty in all, formed what might be termed Pitt’s Club. They met first at a house in Pall Mall, but afterwards occupied rooms in the premises of a man named Goostree, which later on were used as the Shakespeare Gallery.105 Opposition to Lord North’s Ministry was one of the shibboleths of this coterie; but in pre-revolutionary days, when the merely political club was almost unknown, conviviality held the first place at Goostree’s. One who was in George Selwyn’s set evidently thought the ideals aimed at in Pitt’s little society too good for London; for he wrote, at the close of 1781: “Goostree’s is a small society of young men in Opposition, and they are very nice in their admissions; as they discourage gaming as much as possible, their club will not do any harm to Brooks’s, and probably not subsist a great while.” In February 1782 Selwyn himself refers to Pitt as having formed a “society of young ministers who are to fight under his banner ... and they assemble at Goostree’s.” Clearly, then,
this club was political, at least in part. Pitt spent much of his time there, supping at the club every night during the winter of 1780–81; and there it was that he became intimate with William Wilberforce, the most fascinating of his friends.
The young and brilliant member for Hull was a living proof of the triumph which mind can win over physical disadvantages. In person he was slight and bent, and he early suffered from that weakness of the eyes which hampered him through life. Yet, “bodkin” though he was, his quickness of mind, the silvery tones of his voice, the wit that sparkled in his speech, and his uniform geniality and kindliness gained for him a continuous round of social triumphs. His singing possessed a natural charm which drew from the Prince of Wales the statement that he would come at any time to hear Wilberforce sing. Equally attractive was his power of mimicking any public character; but what most of all endeared him to his friends was the genial raillery of his conversation, his power of lively repartee, and the chivalry which shone in all his words and deeds. Mme de Staël afterwards declared him to be the best talker among all the Englishmen she had known; and in that art of the salons the exuberant Genevese was an exacting connoisseur. She, however, could not know the warmth of feeling which animated that slight frame, or the sensitiveness of conscience which was to make him one of the chief uplifting forces of the age. Towards the close of his life he expressed regret that in his youth he had made intellectual conversation his all in all.106 But regret was surely needless, when that gift attracted to him the young statesman whose life at some points he helped to inspire and elevate. Both of them, indeed, were artists in words; and the free play of mind on mind must have helped to strengthen those oratorical powers which were to be devoted to the service of their country and of mankind.
From the pages of Wilberforce’s diary we catch a glimpse, tantalizingly brief, alas, of Pitt as a boon companion, losing among his intimates that shyness which outsiders mistook for pride.
He was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire control.
Others appeared struck by the unwonted association of brilliant images; but every possible combination of ideas seemed always present to his mind, and he could at once produce whatever he desired. I was one of those who met to spend an evening in memory of Shakespeare at the Boar’s Head, East Cheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the most amusing of the party, and the readiest and most apt in the required allusions. He entered with the same energy into all our different amusements; we played a good deal at Goostree’s, and I well remember the intense earnestness that he displayed when joining in these games of chance. He perceived their increasing fascination, and soon after suddenly abandoned them for ever.
This passage, together with its context, is interesting in more ways than one. Firstly it shows that the fashionable vice of the age had crept into Goostree’s more than was known by outsiders; or else Selwyn’s reference to the club belonged to a later period, when Pitt’s resolve to have done with gambling, and the remorse of Wilberforce at having suddenly won a large sum from impecunious friends, had availed to curb the passion for it in their society. The difference of the two friends in temperament is equally noteworthy. In Wilberforce the resolve to break away from gambling was the first sign of awakening of a sensitive conscience, which, though dulled by gaieties, was thenceforth to assert itself more and more and finally to win over the whole of his energies.
Pitt also felt the fascination of play in a manner which shows the eagerness of his animal instincts; but the awakening in his case seems to have been due to self-respect and also to a keen sense of what he owed to the State. How could he, who had early vowed himself to the service of his country, dull his powers and tarnish his name by indulgence in an insidious and enslaving vice? The career of Charles James Fox, we may believe, had already been a warning to the young aspirant. In any case, by an exercise of that imperious will, which controlled even his vehement impulses, he crushed at once and for ever those entangling desires, and came forth fancy-free from that Circean domain, saved by his ennobling resolve to serve England.
In another sense—a less important one, it is true—Pitt was the most unfortunate man of his age. All his friends agreed that he was a delightful talker and the most charming of companions. But there their information ends. Not one of them had the Boswellian love of detail which enables us to peer right into the heart of Johnson, and discern the loves and hates, the prejudices and envyings, the whims and fancies which swayed it. A man can never be known unless we have, not merely his great speeches, but also his small talk. That of Pitt must have been of singular charm, not only from the richness of his mental gifts, but also from the width of the culture which informed them. In learning he equalled the best of his compeers at Cambridge; and we may imagine that his vivid knowledge of the life of Greece and Rome lent to his comparisons and references a grace which could be appreciated by few raconteursof to-day. I have already referred to the stories circulated by those who set themselves to talk and write him down to their own level, that he studied the classics merely in order to provide elegant tags to his speeches. The theme has been embroidered by certain admirers of Fox, who picture the Whig statesman as the disinterested lover of Greece and Rome, and Pitt as a kind of money-grubbing paramour. If these persons, instead of copying from the many malicious stories of that time, would investigate for themselves, they would see through the partisan spitefulness of all such tales. Fortunately, Pitt’s copies of the classics preserved at Orwell Park reveal signs, not only of his frequent perusal of them, but of the pleasure which it brought, as evinced by marginal comments. Away, then, with the Foxite myth of the classical tags!
The passage from Wilberforce’s Diary cited above also shows Pitt to have been well primed with Shakespearean lore, and to have had the mental agility and tact which could cull the right flower from that rich garner. Ill though we could spare any of Pitt’s oratorical efforts, I doubt whether we would not give up any one of his speeches if we could have in return a full record of some of the evenings spent by him and his friends at Goostree’s or the Boar’s Head.
Concerning his ordinary talk we only know that he delighted his family by his gaiety, even amidst the heaviest cares of state. In that terrible year 1793, when England and France had closed in the death
grapple, Lady Chatham refers to his “ease and gay spirits”; and she speaks of him as not looking like a man on whom rested the destinies of kingdoms. A further sentence explains the source of this buoyancy of spirits: “The uprightness of his intentions and the strength of his mind saved him from feeling any oppression from the weight upon him.”107
Here we see the secret of that cheerfulness which charmed his friends. His high spirits were in part, no doubt, bequeathed to him by the ever confident Chatham; but their even flow was also the outcome of his own conscious rectitude. Hence also there came the brightness and sincerity which shone in Pitt’s conversation as also in his life. Another characteristic on which Wilberforce insisted was his strict truthfulness, which his friend attributed to his self-respect and to the moral purity of his nature. Yet there was no taint of priggishness about it. Wilberforce describes him as “remarkably cheerful and pleasant, full of wit and playfulness, neither, like Mr. Fox, fond of arguing a question, nor yet holding forth like some others [Windham is here hinted at]. He was always ready to hear others as well as to talk himself.”108
Obviously, then, Pitt’s conversation was free from some of the defects which mar the efforts of professional talkers. He never used the sledge-hammer methods by which Dr. Johnson too often won an unfair advantage; he scorned to make use of feigned incidents or grossly exaggerated accounts whereby many small wits gain a passing repute. His speech, in private as in public, seems to have resembled a limpid stream, the natural overflow of a mind richly stocked and a nature at once lively and affectionate.
Sometimes the stream raced and danced along, as appears from an entry in the diary of George Selwyn, in March 1782:
When I left the House, I left in one room a party of young men, who made me, from their life and spirits, wish for one night to be twenty. There was a tablefull of them drinking—young Pitt, Lord Euston, Berkley, North, etc., singing and laughing à gorge
déployée: some of them sang very good catches; one Wilberforce, a M. of P., sang the best.
This is only one of many signs that nature had bestowed on Pitt social gifts and graces which under more favourable conditions would have made him the centre of a devoted circle of friends. True, he was too shy and modest to figure as a political Dr. Johnson; too natural to pose as did the literary lion of Strawberry Hill; too prudent to vie with Fox as the chief wit and gamester of a great club. But in his own way and in his own sphere he might have carried on those honourable traditions which have invested the life of St. Stephen’s with literary and social charm, had not Chatham’s premature forcing of his powers devitalized him before the start of a singularly early and exacting career. Here was the ill fortune of Pitt. Like all precocious natures he needed times of rest and recuperation before he reached his prime. He sought them in vain either at Hayes, Cambridge, or Westminster. As we shall see, the very unusual state of English politics down to 1789 would have made the accession of Fox, the unofficial representative of the Prince of Wales, a public misfortune; and soon afterwards there occurred in quick succession the disputes with Spain, Russia, and France, which, after two false alarms, ended in a tremendous war. In such a period how could a delicate man rise to the height of his faculties, either political or social? On both sides of his nature Pitt showed signs of the most brilliant promise; but the premature and incessant strain of public duty robbed him and his country of the full fruition.