Part 42 (2/2)

This broadness of mind often caused him to incur criticism, but it had become so much his nature, and his courage was so great, that he would not depart from it. He had been through the terrible war with the French, and, even before he knew that he was half a Frenchman by blood, he had gladly acknowledged the splendid qualities of the French, their bravery and patience, and their logical minds. He always said during the worst throes of their revolution that the French would emerge from it greater than ever.

His position was similar in the Revolutionary War with the English.

While he cast in his lot with his own people, and suffered with them, he invariably maintained that the English nation was sound at the core. He had fought beside them in a great struggle and he knew how strong and true they were, and when our own strife was over he was most eager for a renewal of good relations with the English, always saying that the fact that they had quarreled and parted did not keep them from being of the same blood and family, and hence natural allies.

He consistently refused to hate an individual. He always insisted that life was too busy to cherish a grudge or seek revenge. Bad acts invariably punished themselves in the course of time. He was able to see some good, a little at least, in everybody. Searching his mind in after years, he could even find excuses for Adrian Van Zoon. He would say to Willet that the man loved nothing but money, that perhaps he had been born that way and could not help it, that he had made his attempts upon him under the influence of what was the greatest of all temptations to him, and that while he paid the slaver to carry him away he had not paid him to kill him. As for Garay, he would say that he might have exceeded orders. He would say the same about the shots the slaver had fired at him at Albany.

This tolerance came partly from his own character, and partly from an enormous experience of life in the raw in his young and formative years.

He knew how men were to a large extent the creatures of circ.u.mstances, and on the individual in particular his judgments were always mild. He had two favorite sayings:

”No man is as bad as he seems to his worst enemy.”

”No man is as good as he seems to his best friend.”

His own faults he knew perfectly well to be quickness of temper and a p.r.o.neness to hasty action. Throughout his life he fought against them and he took as his models Willet and Tayoga, who always appeared to him to have a more thorough command over their own minds and impulses than any other men he ever knew.

Aside from his brilliancy and power in public life, Lennox had other qualities that distinguished him as a man. He was noted for his cosmopolitan views concerning human affairs. He had an uncommon largeness and breadth of vision, all the more notable then, as America was, in many respects, outside the greater world of Europe. People in speaking of him, however, recalled the extraordinary variety and intensity of his experiences. Much of his story was known and it was not diminished in the telling. He was always at home in the woods. He had an uncommon sympathy for hunters, borderers, pathfinders and all kinds of wilderness rovers. He understood them and they instinctively understood him, invariably finding in him a redoubtable champion. He was also closely in touch with the Indian soul, and his friends used to say laughingly that he had something of the Indian in his own nature. At all events, the Great League of the Hodenosaunee found in him a defender and he was more than once an honored guest in the Vale of Onondaga.

On the other hand, his interest in European affairs was always keen and intelligent, especially in those of England and France, with whose sons he had come into contact so much during the great war. He maintained a lifelong correspondence with his friend, Alfred Grosvenor, who ultimately became a n.o.bleman and who sat for more than forty years in the House of Lords. Lennox visited him several times in England, both before and after the quarrel between the colonies and the mother country, which, however, did not diminish their friends.h.i.+p a particle.

In truth, during those troubled times Grosvenor, who was noted for the liberality of his sentiments and for an affection for Americans, conceived during his service as a soldier on their continent in the Seven Years' War, often defended them against the criticism of his countrymen, while Lennox, on his side, very boldly told the people that nothing could alter the fact that England was their mother country, and that no one should even wish to alter it.

But his correspondence with his uncle, Raymond Louis de St. Luc, Marquis de Clermont, not so many years older than himself, covered a period of nearly sixty years filled with world-shaking events, and, though it has been printed for private circulation only, it is a perfect mine of fact, comment and illumination. St. Luc was one of the few French n.o.blemen to foresee the great Revolution in his country, and, while he mourned its excesses, he knew that much of it was justified. His patriotism and courage were so high and so obvious that neither Danton, Marat nor Robespierre dared to attack him. As an old man he supported Napoleon ardently until the empire and the ambitions of the emperor became too swollen, and, while he mourned Waterloo, he told his son, General Robert Lennox de St. Luc, who distinguished himself so greatly there and who almost took the chateau of Hougoumont from the English, that it was for the best, and that it was inevitable. It was the comment of St. Luc, then eighty-five years old and full of experience and wisdom, that a very great man may become too great.

Lennox was noted for his great geniality and his extraordinary capacity for making friends. Yet there was a strain of remarkable gravity, even austerity, in his character. There came times when he wished to be alone, to hear no human voices about him. It was then perhaps that he thought his best thoughts and took, too, his best resolutions. In the great silences he seemed to see more clearly, and the path lay straight before him. Many of his friends thought it an eccentricity, but he knew it was an inheritance from his long stay alone upon the island, a period in his life that had so much effect in molding his character.

It was this ripeness of mind, based upon fullness of information and deep meditation, that made him such a great man in the true sense of the word. As a speaker he was without a rival either in form or substance in the New World. It was said everywhere in New York that the famous Alexander Hamilton and the equally skillful Aaron Burr went to the courtroom regularly to study his methods. Both admitted quite freely in private that they copied his style, though neither was ever able to acquire the wonderful golden voice, the genuine phenomenon that made Lennox so notable.

On one of these occasions, after making a thrilling speech, when he filled the souls of both Hamilton and Burr with despair, a great Onondaga sachem, in the full costume of his nation, said to his friend Willet, once a renowned hunter:

”I always knew Dagaeoga could use more words than any one else could find in the biggest dictionary.”

THE END

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