BURKE
BY
JOHN MORLEY
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1907
_Printed 1888. Reprinted 1892, 1897, 1902, 1907_
(_A Library Edition, of the book published in the "English Men of
Letters Series_)
NOTE
The present writer published a study on Burke some twenty years ago.
It was almost entirely critical, and in no sense a narrative. The
volume that is now submitted to my readers first appeared in the
series of _English Men of Letters_. It is biographical rather
than critical, and not more than about a score of pages have been
reproduced in it from the earlier book. Three pages have been inserted
from an article on Burke contributed by me to the new edition of the
_Encyclopoedia Britannica_; and I have to thank Messrs. Black for
the great courtesy with which they have allowed me to transcribe the
passage here. These borrowings from my former self, the reader will
perhaps be willing to excuse, on the old Greek principle that a man
may once say a thing as he would have it said, [Greek: dis de ouk
endechetai]--he can hardly say it twice.
J.M.
1888.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE AND FIRST WRITINGS
CHAPTER II
IN IRELAND--PARLIAMENT--BEACONSFIELD
CHAPTER III
THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE
CHAPTER IV
THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY--PARIS--ELECTION AT BRISTOL--THE AMERICAN WAR
CHAPTER V
ECONOMICAL REFORM--BURKE IN OFFICE--FALL OF HIS PARTY
CHAPTER VI
BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS
CHAPTER VII
THE NEW MINISTRY--WARREN HASTINGS--BURKE'S PUBLIC POSITION
CHAPTER VIII
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
CHAPTER IX
BURKE AND HIS PARTY--PROGRESS OF THE REVOLUTION--IRELAND--LAST YEARS
CHAPTER X
BURKE'S LITERARY CHARACTER
BURKE
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE, AND FIRST WRITINGS
It will soon be a hundred and twenty years since Burke first took his
seat, in the House of Commons, and it is eighty-five years since his
voice ceased to be heard there. Since his death, as during his life,
opinion as to the place to which he is entitled among the eminent men
of his country has touched every extreme. Tories have extolled him as
the saviour of Europe. Whigs have detested him as the destroyer of his
party. One undiscriminating panegyrist calls him the most profound and
comprehensive of political philosophers that has yet existed in the
world. Another and more distinguished writer insists that he is a
resplendent and far-seeing rhetorician, rather than a deep and subtle
thinker. A third tells us that his works cannot be too much our study,
if we mean either to understand or to maintain against its various
enemies, open and concealed, designing and mistaken, the singular
constitution of this fortunate island. A fourth, on the contrary,
declares that it would be hard to find a single leading principle or
prevailing sentiment in one half of these works, to which something
extremely adverse cannot be found in the other half. A fifth calls
him one of the greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatest
thinker, who ever devoted himself to the practice of English politics.
Yet, oddly enough, the author of the fifth verdict will have it that
this great man and great thinker was actually out of his mind when
he composed the pieces for which he has been most widely admired and
revered.
A sufficient interval has now passed to allow all the sediment of
party fanaticism to fall to the bottom. The circumstances of the world
have since Burke's time undergone variation enough to enable us
to judge, from many points of view, how far he was the splendid
pamphleteer of a faction, and how far he was a contributor to the
universal stock of enduring wisdom. Opinion is slowly, but without
reaction, settling down to the verdict that Burke is one of the
abiding names in our history, not because he either saved Europe
or destroyed the Whig party; but because he added to the permanent
considerations of wise political thought, and to the maxims of wise
practice in great affairs, and because he imprints himself upon us
with a magnificence and elevation of expression that places him among
the highest masters of literature, in one of its highest and most
commanding senses. Those who have acquired a love for abstract
politics amid the almost mathematical closeness and precision of
Hobbes, the philosophic calm of Locke or Mill, or even the majestic
and solemn fervour of Milton, are revolted by the unrestrained passion
and the decorated style of Burke. His passion appears hopelessly
fatal to success in the pursuit of Truth, who does not usually reveal
herself to followers thus inflamed. His ornate style appears fatal to
the cautious and precise method of statement, suitable to matter which
is not known at all unless it is known distinctly. Yet the natural
ardour which impelled Burke to clothe his judgments in glowing and
exaggerated phrases, is one secret of his power over us, because
it kindles in those who are capable of that generous infection a
respondent interest and sympathy. But more than this, the reader is
speedily conscious of the precedence in Burke of the facts of morality
and conduct, of the many interwoven affinities of human affection and
historical relation, over the unreal necessities of mere abstract
logic. Burke's mind was full of the matter of great truths, copiously
enriched from the fountains of generous and many-coloured feeling. He
thought about life as a whole, with all its infirmities and all its
pomps. With none of the mental exclusiveness of the moralist by
profession, he fills every page with solemn reference and meaning;
with none of the mechanical bustle of the common politician, he
is everywhere conscious of the mastery of laws, institutions, and
government over the character and happiness of men. Besides thus
diffusing a strong light over the awful tides of human circumstance,
Burke has the sacred gift of inspiring men to use a grave diligence
in caring for high things, and in making their lives at once rich and
austere. Such a part in literature is indeed high. We feel no emotion
of revolt when Mackintosh speaks of Shakespeare and Burke in the same
breath as being both of them above mere talent. And we do not dissent
when Macaulay, after reading Burke's works over, again, exclaims, "How
admirable! The greatest man since Milton."
The precise date of Burke's birth cannot be stated with certainty. All
that we can say is that it took place either in 1728 or 1729, and it
is possible that we may set it down in one or the other year, as we
choose to reckon by the old or the new style. The best opinion is that
he was born at Dublin on the 12th of January 1729 (N.S.) His father
was a solicitor in good practice, and is believed to have been
descended from some Bourkes of county Limerick, who held a respectable
local position in the time of the civil wars. Burke's mother belonged
to the Nagle family, which had a strong connection in the county of
Cork; they had been among the last adherents of James II., and they
remained firm Catholics. Mrs. Burke remained true to the Church of her
ancestors, and her only daughter was brought up in the same faith.
Edmund Burke and his two brothers, Garret and Richard, were bred in
the religion of their father; but Burke never, in after times, lost a
large and generous way of thinking about the more ancient creed of his
mother and his uncles.
In 1741 he was sent to school at Ballitore, a village some thirty
miles away from Dublin, where Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker from
Yorkshire, had established himself fifteen years before, and had
earned a wide reputation as a successful teacher and a good man.
According to Burke, he richly deserved this high character. It was to
Abraham Shackleton that he always professed to owe whatever gain had
come to him from education. If I am anything, he said many years
afterwards, it is the education I had there that has made me so. His
master's skill as a teacher did not impress him more than the example
which was every day set before him, of uprightness and simplicity of
heart. Thirty years later, when Burke had the news of Shackleton's
death (1771), "I had a true honour and affection," he wrote, "for that
excellent man. I feel something like a satisfaction in the midst of my
concern, that I was fortunate enough to have him once under my roof
before his departure." No man has ever had a deeper or more tender
reverence than Burke for homely goodness, simple purity, and all the
pieties of life; it may well be that this natural predisposition of
all characters, at once so genial and so serious as his, was finally
stamped in him by his first schoolmaster. It is true that he was only
two years at Ballitore, but two years at that plastic time often build
up habits in the mind that all the rest of a life is unable to pull
down.
In 1743 Burke became a student of Trinity College, Dublin, and he
remained there until 1748, when he took his Bachelor's degree. These
five years do not appear to have been spent in strenuous industry in
the beaten paths of academic routine. Like so many other men of great
gifts, Burke in his youth was desultory and excursive. He roamed at
large over the varied heights that tempt our curiosity, as the dawn of
intelligence first lights them up one after another with bewitching
visions and illusive magic. "All my studies," Burke wrote in 1746,
when he was in the midst of them, "have rather proceeded from sallies
of passion, than from the preference of sound reason; and, like all
other natural appetites, have been very violent for a season, and
very soon cooled, and quite absorbed in the succeeding. I have often
thought it a humorous consideration to observe and sum up all the
madness of this kind I have fallen into, this two years past. First, I
was greatly taken with natural philosophy; which, while I should have
given my mind to logic, employed me incessantly. This I call my _furor
mathematicus_. But this worked off as soon as I began to read it in
the college, as men by repletion cast off their stomachs all they have
eaten. Then I turned back to logic and metaphysics. Here I remained a
good while, and with much pleasure, and this was my _furor logicus_,
a disease very common in the days of ignorance, and very uncommon in
these enlightened times. Next succeeded the _furor historicus_, which
also had its day, but is now no more, being entirely absorbed in the
_furor poeticus_."
This is from one of Burke's letters to Richard Shackleton, the son
of his schoolmaster, with whom he had formed one of those close
friendships that fill the life of generous youth, as ambition fills an
energetic manhood. Many tears were shed when the two boys parted at
Ballitore, and they kept up their intimacy by a steady correspondence.
They discuss the everlasting dispute as to the ultimate fate of those
who never heard the saving name of Christ. They send one another
copies of verses, and Burke prays for Shackleton's judgment on an
invocation of his new poem, to beauteous nymphs who haunt the dusky
wood, which hangs recumbent o'er the crystal flood. Burke is warned by
Shackleton to endeavour to live according to the rules of the Gospel,
and he humbly accepts the good advice, with the deprecatory plea
that in a town it is difficult to sit down to think seriously. It is
easier, he says, to follow the rules of the Gospel in the country than
at Trinity College, Dublin. In the region of profaner things the
two friends canvass the comparative worth of Sallust and of Tully's
Epistles. Burke holds for the historian, who has, he thinks, a
fine, easy, diversified narrative, mixed with reflection, moral and
political, neither very trite nor obvious, nor out of the way and
abstract; and this is the true beauty of historical observation.
Some pages of verse describe to Shackleton how his friend passes the
day, but the reader will perhaps be content to learn in humbler prose
that Burke rose with the dawn, and strode forth into the country
through fragrant gardens and the pride of May, until want of breakfast
drove him back unwillingly to the town, where amid lectures and
books his heart incessantly turned to the river and the fir-woods of
Ballitore. In the evening he again turned his back on the city, taking
his way "where Liffey rolls her dead dogs to the sea," along to the
wall on the shore, whence be delighted to see the sun sink into the
waters, gilding ocean, ships, and city as it vanished. Alas, it was
beneath the dignity of verse to tell us what we should most gladly
have known. For,
"The muse nor can, nor will declare,
What is my work, and what my studies there."
What serious nourishment Burke was laying in for his understanding we
cannot learn from any other source. He describes himself as spending
three hours almost every day in the public library; "the best way in
the world," he adds oddly enough, "of killing thought." I have read
some history, he says, and among other pieces of history, "I am
endeavouring to get a little into the accounts of this, our own poor
country,"--a pathetic expression, which represents Burke's perpetual
mood, as long as he lived, of affectionate pity for his native land.
Of the eminent Irishmen whose names adorn the annals of Trinity
College in the eighteenth century, Burke was only contemporary at the
University with one, the luckless sizar who in the fulness of time
wrote the _Vicar of Wakefield_. There is no evidence that at this time
he and Goldsmith were acquainted with one another. Flood had gone to
Oxford some time before. The one or two companions whom Burke mentions
in his letters are only shadows of names. The mighty Swift died in
1745, but there is nothing of Burke's upon the event. In the same year
came the Pretender's invasion, and Burke spoke of those who had taken
part in it in the same generous spirit that he always showed to the
partisans of lost historic causes.
Of his own family Burke says little, save that in 1746 his mother had
a dangerous illness. In all my life, he writes to his friend, I never
found so heavy a grief, nor really did I well know what it was before.
Burke's father is said to have been a man of angry and irritable
temper, and their disagreements were frequent. This unhappy
circumstance made the time for parting not unwelcome. In 1747 Burke's
name had been entered at the Middle Temple, and after taking his
degree, he prepared to go to England to pursue the ordinary course of
a lawyer's studies. He arrived in London in the early part of 1750.
A period of nine years followed, in which the circumstances of Burke's
life are enveloped in nearly complete obscurity. He seems to have kept
his terms in the regular way at the Temple, and from the mastery
of legal principles and methods which he afterwards showed in some
important transactions, we might infer that he did more to qualify
himself for practice than merely dine in the hall of his inn. For law,
alike as a profession and an instrument of mental discipline, he had
always the profound respect that it so amply deserves, though he saw
that it was not without drawbacks of its own. The law, he said, in
his fine description of George Grenville, in words that all who think
about schemes of education ought to ponder, "is, in my opinion, one of
the first and noblest of human sciences; _a science which does more to
quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of
learning put together_; but it is not apt, except in persons very
happily born, to open and to liberalise the mind exactly in the
same proportion."[1] Burke was never called to the bar, and the
circumstance that, about the time when he ought to have been looking
for his first guinea, he published a couple of books which had as
little as possible to do with either law or equity, is a tolerably
sure sign that he had followed the same desultory courses at the
Temple as he had followed at Trinity College. We have only to tell
over again a very old story. The vague attractions of literature
prevailed over the duty of taking up a serious profession. His father,
who had set his heart on having a son in the rank of a barrister, was
first suspicious, then extremely indignant, and at last he withdrew
his son's allowance, or else reduced it so low that the recipient
could not possibly live upon it. This catastrophe took place some time
in 1755,--a year of note in the history of literature, as the date of
the publication of Johnson's _Dictionary_. It was upon literature, the
most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions,
that Burke, like so many hundreds of smaller men before and since, now
threw himself for a livelihood.
[Footnote 1: _American Taxation_.]
Of the details of the struggle we know very little. Burke was not fond
in after life of talking about his earlier days, not because he
had any false shame about the straits and hard shifts of youthful
neediness, but because he was endowed with a certain inborn
stateliness of nature, which made him unwilling to waste thoughts on
the less dignified parts of life. This is no unqualified virtue, and
Burke might have escaped some wearisome frets and embarrassments in
his existence, if he had been capable of letting the detail of the day
lie more heavily upon him. So far as it goes, however, it is a sign of
mental health that a man should be able to cast behind him the barren
memories of bygone squalor. We may be sure that whatever were the
external ordeals of his apprenticeship in the slippery craft of the
literary adventurer, Burke never failed in keeping for his constant
companions generous ambitions and high thoughts. He appears to have
frequented the debating clubs in Fleet Street and the Piazza of Covent
Garden, and he showed the common taste of his time for the theatre.
He was much of a wanderer, partly from the natural desire of restless
youth to see the world, and partly because his health was weak. In
after life he was a man of great strength, capable not only of bearing
the strain of prolonged application to books and papers in the
solitude of his library, but of bearing it at the same time with the
distracting combination of active business among men. At the date of
which we are speaking, he used to seek a milder air at Bristol, or in
Monmouthshire, or Wiltshire. He passed the summer in retired country
villages, reading and writing with desultory industry, in company
with William Burke, a namesake but perhaps no kinsman. It would
be interesting to know the plan and scope of his studies. We are
practically reduced to conjecture. In a letter of counsel to his son
in after years, he gave him a weighty piece of advice, which, is
pretty plainly the key to the reality and fruitfulness of his own
knowledge. "_Reading_," he said, "_and much reading, is good. But the
power of diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind, and of
applying it to every occasion that arises, is far better; so don't
suppress the_ vivida vis." We have no more of Burke's doings than
obscure and tantalising glimpses, tantalising, because he was then at
the age when character usually either fritters itself away, or grows
strong on the inward sustenance of solid and resolute aspirations.
Writing from Battersea to his old comrade, Shackleton, in 1757,
he begins with an apology for a long silence which seems to have
continued from months to years. "I have broken all rules; I have
neglected all decorums; everything except that I have never forgot a
friend, whose good head and heart have made me esteem and love him.
What appearance there may have been of neglect, arises from my
manner of life; chequered with various designs; sometimes in London,
sometimes in remote parts of the country; sometimes in France, and
shortly, please God, to be in America."
One of the hundred inscrutable rumours that hovered about Burke's name
was, that he at one time actually did visit America. This was just as
untrue as that he became a convert to the Catholic faith; or that he
was the lover of Peg Woffington; or that he contested Adam Smith's
chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow along with Hume, and that both
Burke and Hume were rejected in favour of some fortunate Mr. James
Clow. They are all alike unfounded. But the same letter informs
Shackleton of a circumstance more real and more important than any
of these, though its details are only doubtfully known. Burke had
married--when and where, we cannot tell. Probably the marriage took
place in the winter of 1756. His wife was the daughter of Dr. Nugent,
an Irish physician once settled at Bath. One story is that Burke
consulted him in one of his visits to the west of England, and fell in
love with his daughter. Another version makes Burke consult him after
Dr. Nugent had removed to London; and tells how the kindly physician,
considering that the noise and bustle of chambers over a shop must
hinder his patient's recovery, offered him rooms in his own house.
However these things may have been, all the evidence shows Burke to
have been fortunate in the choice or accident that bestowed upon him
his wife. Mrs. Burke, like her father, was, up to the time of her
marriage, a Catholic. Good judges belonging to her own sex describe
her as gentle, quiet, soft in her manners, and well-bred. She had the
qualities which best fitted and disposed her to soothe the vehemence
and irritability of her companion. Though she afterwards conformed to
the religion of her husband, it was no insignificant coincidence
that in two of the dearest relations of his life the atmosphere of
Catholicism was thus poured round the great preacher of the crusade
against the Revolution.
About the time of his marriage, Burke made his first appearance as an
author. It was in 1756 that he published _A Vindication of Natural
Society_, and the more important essay, _A Philosophical Inquiry into
the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful_. The latter of
them had certainly been written a long time before, and there is even
a traditional story that Burke wrote it when he was only nineteen
years old. Both of these performances have in different degrees a
historic meaning, but neither of them would have survived to our own
day unless they had been associated with a name of power. A few
words will suffice to do justice to them here. And first as to the
_Vindication of Natural Society_. Its alternative title was, _A View
of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from every Species of
Civil Society, in a Letter to Lord ----, by a late Noble Writer_.
Bolingbroke had died in 1751, and in 1754 his philosophical works
were posthumously given to the world by David Mallet, Dr. Johnson's
beggarly Scotchman, to whom Bolingbroke had left half-a-crown in his
will, for firing off a blunderbuss which he was afraid to fire
off himself. The world of letters had been keenly excited about
Bolingbroke. His busy and chequered career, his friendship with the
great wits of the previous generation, his splendid style, his bold
opinions, made him a dazzling figure. This was the late Noble Writer
whose opinions Burke intended to ridicule, by reducing them to an
absurdity in an exaggeration of Bolingbroke's own manner. As it
happened, the public did not readily perceive either the exaggeration
in the manner, or the satire in the matter. Excellent judges of style
made sure that the writing was really Bolingbroke's, and serious
critics of philosophy never doubted that the writer, whoever he was,
meant all that he said. We can hardly help agreeing with Godwin, when
he says that in Burke's treatise the evils of existing political
institutions, which had been described by Locke, are set forth more at
large, with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of eloquence,
though the declared intention of the writer was to show that such
evils ought to be considered merely trivial. Years afterwards, Boswell
asked Johnson whether an imprudent publication by a certain friend of
his at an early period of his life would be likely to hurt him? "No,
sir," replied the sage; "not much; it might perhaps be mentioned at an
election." It is significant that in 1765, when Burke saw his chance
of a seat in Parliament, he thought it worth while to print a second
edition of his _Vindication_, with a preface to assure his readers
that the design of it was ironical. It has been remarked as a very
extraordinary circumstance that an author who had the greatest fame
of any man of his day as the master of a superb style, for this was
indeed Bolingbroke's position, should have been imitated to such
perfection by a mere novice, that accomplished critics like
Chesterfield and Warburton should have mistaken the copy for a
firstrate original. It is, however, to be remembered that the very
boldness and sweeping rapidity of Bolingbroke's prose rendered it more
fit for imitation than if its merits had been those of delicacy or
subtlety; and we must remember that the imitator was no pigmy, but
himself one of the giants. What is certain is that the study of
Bolingbroke which preceded this excellent imitation left a permanent
mark, and traces of Bolingbroke were never effaced from the style of
Burke.
The point of the _Vindication_ is simple enough. It is to show that
the same instruments which Bolingbroke had employed in favour of
natural against revealed religion, could be employed with equal
success in favour of natural as against, what Burke calls, artificial
society. "Show me," cries the writer, "an absurdity in religion, and
I will undertake to show you a hundred for one in political laws and
institutions.... If, after all, you should confess all these things,
yet plead the necessity of political institutions, weak and wicked as
they are, I can argue with equal, perhaps superior force, concerning
the necessity of artificial religion; and every step you advance in
your argument, you add a strength to mine. So that if we are resolved
to submit our reason and our liberty to civil usurpation, we have
nothing to do but to conform as quietly as we can to the vulgar
notions which are connected with this, and take up the theology of
the vulgar as well as their politics. But if we think this necessity
rather imaginary than real, we should renounce their dreams of
society, together with their visions of religion, and vindicate
ourselves into perfect liberty."
The most interesting fact about this spirited performance is, that it
is a satirical literary handling of the great proposition which Burke
enforced, with all the thunder and lurid effulgence of his most
passionate rhetoric, five and thirty years later. This proposition is
that the world would fall into ruin, "if the practice of all moral
duties, and the foundations of society, rested upon having their
reasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual." The satire
is intended for an illustration of what with Burke was the cardinal
truth for men, namely, that if you encourage every individual to let
the imagination loose upon all subjects, without any restraint from a
sense of his own weakness, and his subordinate rank in the long scheme
of things, then there is nothing of all that the opinion of ages
has agreed to regard as excellent and venerable, which would not be
exposed to destruction at the hands of rationalistic criticism. This
was Burke's most fundamental and unswerving conviction from the first
piece that he wrote down to the last, and down to the last hour of his
existence.
It is a coincidence worth noticing that only two years before the
appearance of the _Vindication_, Rousseau had published the second
of the two memorable Discourses in which he insisted with serious
eloquence on that which Burke treats as a triumph of irony. He
believed, and many thousands of Frenchmen came to a speculative
agreement with him, that artificial society had marked a decline in
the felicity of man, and there are passages in the Discourse in which
he demonstrates this, that are easily interchangeable with passages
in the _Vindication_. Who would undertake to tell us from internal
evidence whether the following page, with its sombre glow, is an
extract from Burke, or an extract from the book which Rousseau begins
by the sentence that man is born free, yet is he everywhere in
chains?--
There are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people
employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines; these unhappy
wretches scarce ever see the light of the sun; they are buried in
the bowels of the earth; there they work at a severe and dismal
task, without the least prospect of being delivered from it; they
subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare; they have their
health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being
perpetually confined in the close vapour of these malignant
minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without
remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant
drudgery, necessary in refining and managing the products of those
mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent
persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should
we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our just
indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious
a punishment!... But this number, considerable as it is, and the
slavery, with all its baseness and horror, which we have at home,
is nothing to what the rest of the world affords of the same
nature. Millions daily bathed in the poisonous damps and
destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and arsenic, to say
nothing of those other employments, those stations of wretchedness
and contempt, in which civil society has placed the numerous
_enfans perdus_ of her army. Would any rational man submit to one
of the most tolerable of these drudgeries, for all the artificial
enjoyments which policy has made to result from them?... Indeed
the blindness of one part of mankind co-operating with the frenzy
and villainy of the other, has been the real builder of this
respectable fabric of political society: and as the blindness of
mankind has caused their slavery, in return their state of slavery
is made a pretence for continuing them in a state of blindness;
for the politician will tell you gravely that their life of
servitude disqualifies the greater part of the race of man for a
search of truth, and supplies them with no other than mean and
insufficient ideas. This is but too true; and this is one of the
reasons for which I blame such institutions.
From the very beginning, therefore, Burke was drawn to the deepest of
all the currents in the thought of the eighteenth century. Johnson and
Goldsmith continued the traditions of social and polite literature
which had been established by the Queen Anne men. Warburton and a
whole host of apologists carried on the battle against deism and
infidelity. Hume, after furnishing the arsenal of scepticism with
a new array of deadlier engines and more abundant ammunition, had
betaken himself placidly to the composition of history. What is
remarkable in Burke's first performance is his discernment of the
important fact, that behind the intellectual disturbances in the
sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of
theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole
fabric of civil society itself. In France, as all students of its
speculative history are agreed, there came a time in the eighteenth
century when theological controversy was turned into political
controversy. Innovators left the question about the truth of
Christianity, and busied themselves with questions about the ends
and means of governments. The appearance of Burke's _Vindication
of Natural Society_ coincides in time with the beginning of this
important transformation. Burke foresaw from the first what, if
rationalism were allowed to run an unimpeded course, would be the
really great business of the second halt of his century.
If in his first book Burke showed how alive he was to the profound
movement of the time, in the second he dealt with one of the most
serious of its more superficial interests. The essay on the Sublime
and Beautiful fell in with a set of topics on which the curiosity of
the better minds of the age, alike in France, England, and Germany,
was fully stirred. In England the essay has been ordinarily slighted;
it has perhaps been overshadowed by its author's fame in weightier
matters. The nearest approach to a full and serious treatment of its
main positions is to be found in Dugald Stewart's lectures. The
great rhetorical art-critic of our own day refers to it in words of
disparagement, and in truth it has none of the flummery of modern
criticism. It is a piece of hard thinking, and it has the distinction
of having interested and stimulated Lessing, the author of _Laoköon_
(1766), by far the most definitely valuable of all the contributions
to aesthetic thought in an age which was not poor in them. Lessing was
so struck with the _Inquiry_ that he set about a translation of it,
and the correspondence between him and Moses Mendelssohn on the
questions which Burke had raised contains the germs of the doctrine as
to poetry and painting which _Laoköon_ afterwards made so famous. Its
influence on Lessing and on Kant was such as to justify the German
historian of the literature of the century in bestowing on it the
coveted epithet of epoch-making.
The book is full of crudities. We feel the worse side of the
eighteenth century when Burke tells us that a thirst for Variety in
architecture is sure to leave very little true taste; or that an air
of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; or that sad
fuscous colours are indispensable for sublimity. Many of the sections,
again, are little more than expanded definitions from the dictionary.
Any tyro may now be shocked at such a proposition as that beauty acts
by relaxing the solids of the whole system. But at least one signal
merit remains to the _Inquiry_. It was a vigorous enlargement of the
principle, which Addison had not long before timidly illustrated, that
critics of art seek its principles in the wrong place, so long as
they limit their search to poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and
buildings, instead of first arranging the sentiments and faculties in
man to which art makes its appeal. Addison's treatment was slight and
merely literary; Burke dealt boldly with his subject on the base of
the most scientific psychology that was then within his reach. To
approach it on the psychological side at all was to make a distinct
and remarkable advance in the method of the inquiry which he had taken
in hand.