It is, or it _would_ be, if Mr. Schlosser were himself more interesting,
luxurious to pursue his ignorance as to facts, and the craziness of his
judgment as to the valuation of minds, throughout his comparison of Burke
with Fox. The force of antithesis brings out into a feeble life of
meaning, what, in its own insulation, had been languishing mortally into
nonsense. The darkness of his 'Burke' becomes _visible_ darkness under the
glimmering that steals upon it from the desperate commonplaces of this
'Fox.' Fox is painted exactly as he _would_ have been painted fifty years
ago by any pet subaltern of the Whig club, enjoying free pasture in
Devonshire House. The practised reader knows well what is coming. Fox is
'formed after the model of the ancients'--Fox is 'simple'--Fox is
'natural'--Fox is 'chaste'--Fox is 'forcible;' why yes, in a sense, Fox is
even 'forcible:' but then, to feel that he was so, you must have _heard_
him; whereas, for forty years he has been silent. We of 1847, that can
only _read_ him, hearing Fox described as _forcible_, are disposed to
recollect Shakspeare's Mr. Feeble amongst Falstaff's recruits, who also is
described as _forcible_, viz., as the 'most forcible Feeble.' And,
perhaps, a better description could not be devised for Fox himself--so
feeble was he in matter, so forcible in manner; so powerful for instant
effect, so impotent for posterity. In the Pythian fury of his gestures--in
his screaming voice--in his directness of purpose, Fox would now remind
you of some demon steam-engine on a railroad, some Fire-king or Salmoneus,
that had counterfeited, because he could not steal, Jove's thunderbolts;
hissing, bubbling, snorting, fuming; demoniac gas, you think--gas from
Acheron must feed that dreadful system of convulsions. But pump out the
imaginary gas, and, behold! it is ditch-water. Fox, as Mr. Schlosser
rightly thinks, was all of a piece--simple in his manners, simple in his
style, simple in his thoughts. No waters in _him_ turbid with new
crystalizations; everywhere the eye can see to the bottom. No music in
_him_ dark with Cassandra meanings. Fox, indeed, disturb decent gentlemen
by 'allusions to all the sciences, from the integral calculus and
metaphysics to navigation!' Fox would have seen you hanged first. Burke,
on the other hand, did all that, and other wickedness besides, which fills
an 8vo page in Schlosser; and Schlosser crowns his enormities by charging
him, the said Burke (p. 99), with '_wearisome tediousness_.' Among my own
acquaintances are several old women, who think on this point precisely as
Schlosser thinks; and they go further, for they even charge Burke with
'tedious wearisomeness.' Oh, sorrowful woe, and also woeful sorrow, when
an Edmund Burke arises, like a _cheeta_ or hunting leopard coupled in a
tiger-chase with a German poodle. To think, in a merciful spirit, of the
jungle--barely to contemplate, in a temper of humanity, the
incomprehensible cane-thickets, dark and bristly, into which that bloody
_cheeta_ will drag that unoffending poodle!
But surely the least philosophic of readers, who hates philosophy 'as toad
or asp,' must yet be aware, that, where new growths are not germinating,
it is no sort of praise to be free from the throes of growth. Where
expansion is hopeless, it is little glory to have escaped distortion. Nor
is it any blame that the rich fermentation of grapes should disturb the
transparency of their golden fluids. Fox had nothing new to tell us, nor
did he hold a position amongst men that required or would even have
allowed him to tell anything new. He was helmsman to a party; what he had
to do, though seeming to _give_ orders, was simply to repeat _their_
orders--'Port your helm,' said the party; 'Port it is,' replied the
helmsman.--But Burke was no steersman; he was the Orpheus that sailed with
the Argonauts; he was their _seer_, seeing more in his visions than he
always understood himself; he was their watcher through the hours of
night; he was their astrological interpreter. Who complains of a prophet
for being a little darker of speech than a post-office directory? or of
him that reads the stars for being sometimes perplexed?
But, even as to facts, Schlosser is always blundering. Post-office
directories would be of no use to _him;_ nor link-boys; nor blazing
tar-barrels. He wanders in a fog such as sits upon the banks of Cocytus.
He fancies that Burke, in his lifetime, was _popular_. Of course, it
is so natural to be popular by means of '_wearisome tediousness_,'
that Schlosser, above all people, should credit such a tale. Burke has
been dead just fifty years, come next autumn. I remember the time from
this accident--that my own nearest relative stepped on a day of October,
1797, into that same suite of rooms at Bath (North Parade) from which, six
hours before, the great man had been carried out to die at Beaconsfield.
It is, therefore, you see, fifty years. Now, ever since then, his
_collective_ works have been growing in bulk by the incorporation of
juvenile essays (such as his 'European Settlements,' his 'Essay on the
Sublime,' on 'Lord Bolingbroke,' &c.) or (as more recently) by the
posthumous publication of his MSS; [9] and yet, ever since then, in spite
of growing age and growing bulk, are more in demand. At this time, half a
century after his last sigh, Burke _is_ popular; a thing, let me tell
you, Schlosser, which never happened before to a writer steeped to his
lips in _personal_ politics. What a tilth of intellectual lava must
that man have interfused amongst the refuse and scoria of such mouldering
party rubbish, to force up a new verdure and laughing harvests, annually
increasing for new generations! Popular he _is_ now, but popular he
was not in his own generation. And how could Schlosser have the face to
say that he was? Did he never hear the notorious anecdote, that at one
period Burke obtained the _sobriquet_ of 'dinner-bell?' And why? Not
as one who invited men to a banquet by his gorgeous eloquence, but as one
that gave a signal to shoals in the House of Commons, for seeking refuge
in a _literal_ dinner from the oppression of his philosophy. This
was, perhaps, in part a scoff of his opponents. Yet there must have been
some foundation for the scoff, since, at an earlier stage of Burke's
career, Goldsmith had independently said, that this great orator
--------'went on refining,
And thought of convincing, whilst _they_ thought of dining.'
I blame neither party. It ought not to be expected of any _popular_
body that it should be patient of abstractions amongst the intensities of
party-strife, and the immediate necessities of voting. No deliberative
body would less have tolerated such philosophic exorbitations from public
business than the _agora_ of Athens, or the Roman senate. So far the
error was in Burke, not in the House of Commons. Yet, also, on the other
side, it must be remembered, that an intellect of Burke's combining power
and enormous compass, could not, from necessity of nature, abstain from
such speculations. For a man to reach a remote posterity, it is sometimes
necessary that he should throw his voice over to them in a vast arch--it
must sweep a parabola--which, therefore, rises high above the heads of
those next to him, and is heard by the bystanders but indistinctly, like
bees swarming in the upper air before they settle on the spot fit for
hiving.
See, therefore, the immeasurableness of misconception. Of all public men,
that stand confessedly in the first rank as to splendor of intellect,
Burke was the _least_ popular at the time when our blind friend Schlosser
assumes him to have run off with the lion's share of popularity. Fox, on
the other hand, as the leader of opposition, was at that time a household
term of love or reproach, from one end of the island to the other. To the
very children playing in the streets, Pitt and Fox, throughout Burke's
generation, were pretty nearly as broad distinctions, and as much a war-
cry, as English and French, Roman and Punic. Now, however, all this is
altered. As regards the relations between the two Whigs whom Schlosser so
steadfastly delighteth to misrepresent,
'Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer'
for that intellectual potentate, Edmund Burke, the man whose true mode of
power has never yet been truly investigated; whilst Charles Fox is known
only as an echo is known, and for any real _effect_ of intellect upon
this generation, for anything but the 'whistling of a name,' the Fox of
1780-1807 sleeps where the carols of the larks are sleeping, that
gladdened the spring-tides of those years--sleeps with the roses that
glorified the beauty of their summers. [10]