BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS
Though Burke had, at a critical period of his life, definitely
abandoned the career of letters, he never withdrew from close intimacy
with the groups who still live for us in the pages of Boswell, as no
other literary group in our history lives. Goldsmith's famous lines in
_Retaliation_ show how they all deplored that he should to party give
up what was meant for mankind. They often told one another that Edmund
Burke was the man whose genius pointed him out as the triumphant
champion of faith and sound philosophy against deism, atheism, and
David Hume. They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into his
subject like a serpent. Everybody felt at the Literary Club that he
had no superior in knowledge, and in colloquial dialectics only one
equal. Garrick was there, and of all the names of the time he is the
man whom one would perhaps most willingly have seen, because the gifts
which threw not only Englishmen, but Frenchmen like Diderot, and
Germans like Lichtenberg, into amazement and ecstasy, are exactly
those gifts which literary description can do least to reproduce.
Burke was one of his strongest admirers, and there was no more zealous
attendant at the closing series of performances in which the great
monarch of the stage abdicated his throne. In the last pages that
he wrote, Burke refers to his ever dear friend Garrick, dead nearly
twenty years before, as the first of actors because he was the acutest
observer of nature that he had ever known. Then among men who pass
for being more serious than players, Robertson was often in London
society, and he attracted Burke by his largeness and breadth. He sent
a copy of his _History of America_, and Burke thanked him with many
stately compliments for having employed philosophy to judge of
manners, and from manners having drawn new resources of philosophy.
Gibbon was there, but the bystanders felt what was too crudely
expressed by Mackintosh, that Gibbon might have been taken from a
corner of Burke's mind without ever being missed. Though Burke and
Gibbon constantly met, it is not likely that, until the Revolution,
there was much intimacy between them, in spite of the respect which
each of them might well have had for the vast knowledge of the other.
When the _Decline and Fall_ was published, Burke read it as everybody
else did; but he told Reynolds that he disliked the style, as very
affected, mere frippery and tinsel. Sir Joshua himself was neither
a man of letters nor a keen politician; but he was full of literary
ideas and interests, and he was among Burke's warmest and most
constant friends, following him with an admiration and reverence that
even Johnson sometimes thought excessive. The reader of Reynolds's
famous Discourses will probably share the wonder of his
contemporaries, that a man whose time was so absorbed in the practice
of his art, should have proved himself so excellent a master in the
expression of some of its principles. Burke was commonly credited with
a large share in their composition, but the evidence goes no further
than that Reynolds used to talk them over with him. The friendship
between the pair was full and unalloyed. What Burke admired in the
great artist was his sense and his morals, no less than his genius;
and to a man of his fervid and excitable temper there was the most
attractive of all charms in Sir Joshua's placidity, gentleness,
evenness, and the habit, as one of his friends described it, of being
the same all the year round. When Reynolds died in 1792, he appointed
Burke one of his executors, and left him a legacy of two thousand
pounds, besides cancelling a bond of the same amount.
Johnson, however, is the only member of that illustrious company who
can profitably be compared with Burke in strength and impressiveness
of personality, in a large sensibility at once serious and genial, in
brooding care for all the fulness of human life. This striking pair
were the two complements of a single noble and solid type, holding
tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to the best ideas
of a society that was slowly passing. They were powerless to hinder
the inevitable transformation. One of them did not even dimly
foresee it. But both of them help us to understand how manliness and
reverence, strength and tenderness, love of truth and pity for man,
all flourished under old institutions and old ways of thinking, into
which the forces of the time were even then silently breathing a new
spirit. The friendship between Burke and Johnson lasted as long as
they lived; and if we remember that Johnson was a strong Tory, and
declared that the first Whig was the devil, and habitually talked
about cursed Whigs and bottomless Whigs, it is an extraordinary fact
that his relations with the greatest Whig writer and politician of his
day were marked by a cordiality, respect, and admiration that never
varied nor wavered. "Burke," he said in a well-known passage, "is such
a man that if you met him for the first time in the street, where you
were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take
shelter but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner that,
when you parted, you would say, This is an extraordinary man. He is
never what we would call humdrum; never unwilling to begin to talk,
nor in haste to leave off." That Burke was as good a listener as he
was a talker, Johnson never would allow. "So desirous is he to talk,"
he said, "that if one is talking at this end of the table, he'll talk
to somebody at the other end." Johnson was far too good a critic, and
too honest a man, to assent to a remark of Robertson's, that Burke had
wit. "No, sir," said the sage, most truly, "he never succeeds there.
'Tis low, 'tis conceit." Wit apart, he described Burke as the only
man whose common conversation corresponded to his general fame in the
world; take up whatever topic you might please, he was ready to meet
you. When Burke found a seat in Parliament, Johnson said, "Now we who
know Burke, know that he will be one of the first men in the country."
He did not grudge that Burke should be the first man in the House of
Commons, for Burke, he said, was always the first man everywhere. Once
when he was ill, somebody mentioned Burke's name. Johnson cried out,
"That fellow calls forth all my powers; were I to see Burke now it
would kill me."
Burke heartily returned this high appreciation. When some flatterer
hinted that Johnson had taken more than his right share of the
evening's talk, Burke said, "Nay, it is enough for me to have rung
the bell for him." Some one else spoke of a successful imitation
of Johnson's style. Burke with vehemence denied the success: the
performance, he said, had the pomp, but not the force of the original;
the nodosities of the oak, but not its strength; the contortions of
the sibyl, but none of the inspiration. When Burke showed the old
sage of Bolt Court over his fine house and pleasant gardens at
Beaconsfield, _Non invideo equidem_, Johnson said, with placid
good-will, _miror magis_. They always parted in the deep and pregnant
phrase of a sage of our own day, _except in opinion not disagreeing_.
In truth, the explanation of the sympathy between them is not far
to seek. We may well believe that Johnson was tacitly alive to the
essentially conservative spirit of Burke even in his most Whiggish
days. And Burke penetrated the liberality of mind in a Tory, who
called out with loud indignation that the Irish were in a most
unnatural state, for there the minority prevailed over the majority,
and the severity of the persecution exercised by the Protestants
of Ireland against the Catholics exceeded that of the ten historic
persecutions of the Christian Church.
The parties at Beaconsfield, and the evenings at the "Turk's Head" in
Gerard Street, were contemporary with the famous days at Holbach's
country house at Grandval. When we think of the reckless themes that
were so recklessly discussed by Holbach, Diderot, and the rest of that
indefatigable band, we feel that, as against the French philosophic
party, an English Tory like Johnson and an English Whig like Burke
would have found their own differences too minute to be worth
considering. If the group from the "Turk's Head" could have been
transported for an afternoon to Grandval, perhaps Johnson would have
been the less impatient and disgusted of the two. He had the capacity
of the more genial sort of casuist for playing with subjects, even
moral subjects, with the freedom, versatility, and ease that are
proper to literature. Burke, on the contrary, would not have failed
to see, as indeed we know that he did not fail to see, that a social
pandemonium was being prepared in this intellectual paradise of open
questions, where God and a future life, marriage and the family, every
dogma of religion, every prescription of morality, and all those
mysteries and pieties of human life which have been sanctified by the
reverence of ages, were being busily pulled to pieces as if they had
been toys in the hands of a company of sportive children. Even the
_Beggar's Opera_ Burke could not endure to hear praised for its wit
or its music, because his mind was filled by thought of its misplaced
levity, and he only saw the mischief which such a performance tended
to do to society. It would be hard to defend his judgment in this
particular case, but it serves to show how Burke was never content
with the literary point of view, and how ready and vigilant he was for
effects more profound than those of formal criticism. It is true that
Johnson was sometimes not less austere in condemning a great work of
art for its bad morality. The only time when he was really angry with
Hannah More was on his finding that she had read _Tom Jones_--that
vicious book, he called it; he hardly knew a more corrupt work.
Burke's tendency towards severity of moral judgment, however, never
impaired the geniality and tenderness of his relations with those whom
he loved. Bennet Langton gave Boswell an affecting account of Burke's
last interview with Johnson. A few days before the old man's death,
Burke and four or five other friends were sitting round his bedside.
"Mr. Burke said to him, 'I am afraid, sir, such a number of us may be
oppressive to you.' 'No, sir,' said Johnson, 'it is not so; and I must
be in a wretched state indeed when your company is not a delight
to me.' Mr. Burke, in a tremulous voice, expressive of being very
tenderly affected, replied, 'My dear sir, you have always been too
good to me.' Immediately afterwards he went away. This was the last
circumstance in the acquaintance of these two eminent men."
One of Burke's strongest political intimacies was only less
interesting and significant than his friendship with Johnson.
William Dowdeswell had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the short
Rockingham administration of 1765. He had no brilliant gifts, but he
had what was then thought a profound knowledge both of the principles
and details of the administration of the national revenue. He was
industrious, steadfast, clearheaded, inexorably upright. "Immersed in
the greatest affairs," as Burke said in his epitaph, "he never
lost the ancient, native, genuine English character of a country
gentleman." And this was the character in which Burke now and always
saw not only the true political barrier against despotism on the one
hand and the rabble on the other, but the best moral type of civic
virtue. Those who admire Burke, but cannot share his admiration for
the country gentleman, will perhaps justify him by the assumption that
he clothed his favourite with ideal qualities which ought, even if
they did not, to have belonged to that position.
In his own modest imitation and on his own humble scale he was a
pattern of the activity in public duty, the hospitality towards
friends, the assiduous protection of neglected worth, which ought to
be among the chief virtues of high station. It would perhaps be doubly
unsafe to take for granted that many of our readers have both turned
over the pages of Crabbe's _Borough_, and carried away in their minds
from that moderately affecting poem, the description of Eusebius--
That pious moralist, that reasoning saint!
Can I of worth like thine, Eusebius, speak?
The man is willing, but the muse is weak.
Eusebius is intended for Burke, and the portrait is a literary tribute
for more substantial services. When Crabbe came up from his native
Aldborough, with three pounds and a case of surgical instruments in
his trunk, he fondly believed that a great patron would be found to
watch over his transformation from an unsuccessful apothecary into a
popular poet. He wrote to Lord North and Lord Shelburne, but they did
not answer his letters; booksellers returned his copious manuscripts;
the three pounds gradually disappeared; the surgical instruments went
to the pawnbroker's; and the poet found himself an outcast on the
world, without a friend, without employment, and without bread. He
owed money for his lodging, and was on the very eve of being sent to
prison, when it occurred to him to write to Burke. It was the moment
(1781) when the final struggle with Lord North was at its fiercest,
and Burke might have been absolved if, in the stress of conflict,
he had neglected a begging-letter. As it was, the manliness and
simplicity of Crabbe's application touched him. He immediately made an
appointment with the young poet, and convinced himself of his worth.
He not only relieved Crabbe's immediate distress with a sum of money
that, as we know, came from no affluence of his own, but carried him
off to Beaconsfield, installed him there as a member of the family,
and took as much pains to find a printer for _The Library_ and _The
Village_, as if they had been poems of his own. In time he persuaded
the Bishop of Norwich to admit Crabbe, in spite of his want of a
regular qualification, to holy orders. He then commended him to
the notice of Lord Chancellor Thurlow. Crabbe found the Tiger less
formidable than his terrifying reputation, for Thurlow at their first
interview presented him with a hundred-pound note, and afterwards gave
him a living. The living was of no great value, it is true; and it was
Burke who, with untiring friendship, succeeded in procuring something
like a substantial position for him, by inducing the Duke of Rutland
to make the young parson his chaplain. Henceforth Crabbe's career was
assured, and he never forgot to revere and bless the man to whose
generous hand he owed his deliverance.
Another of Burke's clients, of whom we hardly know whether to say that
he is more or less known to our age than Crabbe, is Barry, a painter
of disputable eminence. The son of a seafarer at Cork, he had been
introduced to Burke in Dublin in 1762, was brought over to England by
him, introduced to some kind of employment, and finally sent, with
funds provided by the Burkes, to study art on the continent. It was
characteristic of Burke's willingness not only to supply money, but
what is a far rarer form of kindness, to take active trouble, that he
should have followed the raw student with long and careful letters of
advice upon the proper direction of his studies. For five years Barry
was maintained abroad by the Burkes. Most unhappily for himself he was
cursed with an irritable and perverse temper, and he lacked even the
elementary arts of conduct. Burke was generous to the end, with that
difficult and uncommon kind of generosity which moves independently of
gratitude or ingratitude in the receiver.
From his earliest days Burke had been the eager friend of people in
distress. While he was still a student at the Temple, or a writer for
the booksellers, he picked up a curious creature in the park, in such
unpromising circumstances that he could not forbear to take him under
his instant protection. This was Joseph Emin, the Armenian, who had
come to Europe from India with strange heroic ideas in his head as to
the deliverance of his countrymen. Burke instantly urged him to accept
the few shillings that he happened to have in his purse, and seems
to have found employment for him as a copyist, until fortune brought
other openings to the singular adventurer. For foreign visitors Burke
had always a singular considerateness. Two Brahmins came to England
as agents of Ragonaut Rao, and at first underwent intolerable things
rather from the ignorance than the unkindness of our countrymen. Burke
no sooner found out what was passing than he carried them down to
Beaconsfield, and as it was summer-time, he gave them for their
separate use a spacious garden-house, where they were free to prepare
their food and perform such rites as their religion prescribed.
Nothing was so certain to command his fervid sympathy as strict
adherence to the rules and ceremonies of an ancient and sacred
ordering.
If he never failed to perform the offices to which we are bound by
the common sympathy of men, it is satisfactory to think that Burke in
return received a measure of these friendly services. Among those who
loved him best was Dr. Brocklesby, the tender physician who watched
and soothed the last hours of Johnson. When we remember how Burke's
soul was harassed by private cares, chagrined by the untoward course
of public events, and mortified by neglect from friends no less than
by virulent reproach from foes, it makes us feel very kindly towards
Brocklesby, to read what he wrote to Burke in 1788:--
MY VERY DEAR FRIEND--My veneration of your public conduct for many
years past, and my real affection for your private virtues and
transcendent worth, made me yesterday take a liberty with you in a
moment's conversation at my house, to make you an instant present
of £1000, which for years past I had by will destined as a
testimony of my regard on my decease. This you modestly desired me
not to think of; but I told you what I now repeat, that unfavoured
as I have lived for a long life, unnoticed professionally by any
party of men, and though unknown at court, I am rich enough to
spare to virtue (what others waste in vice) the above sum, and
still reserve an annual income greater than I spend. I shall
receive at the India House a bill I have discounted for £1000
on the 4th of next month, and then shall be happy that you will
accept this proof of my sincere love and esteem, and let me add,
_Si res ampla domi similisque affectibus esset_, I should be happy
to repeat the like every year.
The mere transcription of the friendly man's good letter has something
of the effect of an exercise of religion. And it was only one of a
series of kind acts on the part of the same generous giver.
It is always interesting in the case of a great man to know how he
affected the women of his acquaintance. Women do not usually judge
character either so kindly or so soundly as men do, for they lack that
knowledge of the ordeals of practical life, which gives both justice
and charity to such verdicts. But they are more susceptible than most
men are to devotion and nobility in character. The little group of the
blue-stockings of the day regarded the great master of knowledge
and eloquence with mixed feelings. They felt for Burke the adoring
reverence which women offer, with too indiscriminate a trust, to men
of commanding power. In his case it was the moral loftiness of his
character that inspired them, as much as the splendour of his ability.
Of Sheridan or of Fox they could not bear to hear; of Burke they could
not hear enough. Hannah More, and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the learned
translator of Epictetus, and Fanny Burney, the author of _Evelina_ and
_Cecilia_, were all proud of his notice, even while they glowed with
anger at his sympathy with American rebels, his unkind words about the
king, and his cruel persecution of poor Mr. Hastings. It was at Mrs.
Vesey's evening parties, given on the Tuesdays on which the Club dined
at the "Turk's Head," that he often had long chats with Hannah More.
She had to forget what she called his political malefactions, before
she could allow herself to admire his high spirits and good humour.
This was after the events of the Coalition, and her _Memoirs_, like
the change in the mind of the Dissenters towards Burke, show what a
fall that act of faction was believed to mark in his character. When
he was rejected for Bristol, she moralised on the catastrophe by the
quaint reflection, that Providence has wisely contrived to render all
its dispensations equal, by making those talents which set one man
so much above another, of no esteem in the opinion of those who are
without them.
Miss Burney has described her flutter of spirits when she first found
herself in company with Burke (1782). It was at Sir Joshua's house on
the top of Richmond Hill, and she tells, with her usual effusion, how
she was impressed by Burke's noble figure and commanding air, his
penetrating and sonorous voice, his eloquent and copious language, the
infinite variety and rapidity of his discourse. Burke had something to
say on every subject, from bits of personal gossip, up to the sweet
and melting landscape that lay in all its beauty before their windows
on the terrace. He was playful, serious, fantastic, wise. When they
next met, the great man completed his conquest by expressing his
admiration of _Evelina_. Gibbon assured her that he had read the whole
five volumes in a day; but Burke declared the feat was impossible, for
he had himself read it through without interruption, and it had cost
him three days. He showed his regard for the authoress in a more
substantial way than by compliments and criticism. His last act,
before going out of office, in 1783, was to procure for Dr. Burney the
appointment of organist at the chapel of Chelsea.
We have spoken of the dislike of these excellent women for Sheridan
and Fox. In Sheridan's case Burke did not much disagree with them.
Their characters were as unlike and as antipathetic as those of two
men could be; and to antipathy of temperament was probably added a
kind of rivalry, which may justly have affected one of them with an
irritated humiliation. Sheridan was twenty years younger than Burke,
and did not come into Parliament until Burke had fought the prolonged
battle of the American war, and had achieved the victory of Economic
Reform. Yet Sheridan was immediately taken up by the party, and became
the intimate and counsellor of Charles Fox, its leader, and of the
Prince of Wales, its patron. That Burke never failed to do full
justice to Sheridan's brilliant genius, or to bestow generous and
unaffected praise on his oratorical successes, there is ample
evidence. He was of far too high and veracious a nature to be capable
of the disparaging tricks of a poor jealousy. The humiliation lay in
the fact that circumstances had placed Sheridan in a position, which
made it natural for the world to measure them with one another. Burke
could no more like Sheridan than he could like the _Beggar's Opera_.
Sheridan had a levity, a want of depth, a laxity and dispersion of
feeling, to which no degree of intellectual brilliancy could reconcile
a man of such profound moral energy and social conviction as Burke.
The thought will perhaps occur to the reader that Fox was not less
lax than Sheridan, and yet for Fox Burke long had the sincerest
friendship. He was dissolute, indolent, irregular, and the most
insensate gambler that ever squandered fortune after fortune over the
faro-table. It was his vices as much as his politics that made George
III. hate Fox as an English Catiline. How came Burke to accept a man
of this character, first for his disciple, then for his friend, and
next for his leader? The answer is a simple one. In spite of the
disorders of his life, Fox, from the time when his acquaintance with
Burke began, down to the time when it came to such disastrous end,
and for long years afterwards, was to the bottom of his heart as
passionate for freedom, justice, and beneficence as Burke ever was.
These great ends were as real, as constant, as overmastering in Fox
as they were in Burke. No man was ever more deeply imbued with the
generous impulses of great statesmanship, with chivalrous courage,
with the magnificent spirit of devotion to high imposing causes. These
qualities we may be sure, and not his power as a debater and as a
declaimer, won for him in Burke's heart the admiration which found
such splendid expression in a passage that will remain as a stock
piece of declamation for long generations after it was first poured
out as a sincere tribute of reverence and affection. Precisians, like
Lafayette, might choose to see their patriotic hopes ruined rather
than have them saved by Mirabeau, because Mirabeau was a debauchee.
Burke's public morality was of stouter stuff, and he loved Fox because
he knew that under the stains and blemishes that had been left by a
deplorable education, was that sterling, inexhaustible ore in which
noble sympathies are subtly compounded with resplendent powers.
If he was warmly attached to his political friends, Burke, at least
before the Revolution, was usually on fair terms in private life with
his political opponents. There were few men whose policy he disliked
more than he disliked the policy of George Grenville. And we have seen
that he criticised Grenville in a pamphlet which did not spare him.
Yet Grenville and he did not refuse one another's hospitality, and
were on the best terms to the very end. Wilberforce, again, was one
of the staunchest friends of Pitt, and fought one of the greatest
electioneering battles on Pitt's side in the struggle of 1784; but it
made no difference in Burke's relations with him. In 1787 a coldness
arose between them. Burke had delivered a strong invective against
the French Treaty. Wilberforce said, "We can make allowance for the
honourable gentleman, because we remember him in better days." The
retort greatly nettled Burke, but the feeling soon passed away,
and they both found a special satisfaction in the dinner to which
Wilberforce invited Burke every session. "He was a great man," says
Wilberforce. "I could never understand how at one time he grew to be
so entirely neglected."
Outside of both political and literary circles, among Burke's
correspondents was that wise and honest traveller whose name is as
inseparably bound up with the preparation of the French Revolution, as
Burke's is bound up with its sanguinary climax and fulfilment. Arthur
Young, by his Farmer's Letters, and Farmer's Calendar, and his account
of his travels in the southern counties of England and elsewhere--the
story of the more famous travels in France was not published until
1792--had won a reputation as the best informed agriculturist of his
day. Within a year of his settlement at Beaconsfield, we find Burke
writing to consult Young on the mysteries of his new occupation. The
reader may smile as he recognises the ardour, the earnestness, the
fervid gravity of the political speeches, in letters which discuss
the merits of carrots in fattening porkers, and the precise degree to
which they should be boiled. Burke throws himself just as eagerly into
white peas and Indian corn, into cabbages that grow into head and
cabbages that shoot into leaves, into experiments with pumpkin seed
and wild parsnip, as if they had been details of the Stamp Act, or
justice to Ireland. When he complains that it is scarcely possible
for him, with his numerous avocations, to get his servants to enter
fully into his views as to the right treatment of his crops, we can
easily understand that his farming did not help him to make money. It
is impossible that he should have had time or attention to spare for
the effectual direction of even a small farm.
Yet if the farm brought scantier profit than it ought to have brought,
it was probably no weak solace in the background of a life of
harassing interests and perpetual disappointments. Burke was happier
at Beaconsfield than anywhere else, and he was happiest there when his
house was full of guests. Nothing pleased him better than to drive a
visitor over to Windsor, where he would expatiate with enthusiasm "on
the proud Keep, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the
double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, overseeing and guarding
the subjected land." He delighted to point out the house at
Uxbridge where Charles I. had carried on the negotiations with the
Parliamentary Commissioners; the beautiful grounds of Bulstrode, where
Judge Jefferies had once lived; and the churchyard of Beaconsfield,
where lay the remains of Edmund Waller, the poet. He was fond of
talking of great statesmen--of Walpole, of Pulteney, and of Chatham.
Some one had said that Chatham knew nothing whatever except Spenser's
_Faery Queen_. "No matter how that was said," Burke replied to one of
his visitors, "whoever relishes and reads Spenser as he ought to be
read, will have a strong hold of the English language." The delight of
the host must have been at least equalled by the delight of the guest
in conversation which was thus ever taking new turns, branching into
topical surprises, and at all turns and on every topic was luminous,
high, edifying, full.
No guest was more welcome than the friend of his boyhood, and Richard
Shackleton has told how the friendship, cordiality, and openness with
which Burke embraced him was even more than might be expected from
long love. The simple Quaker was confused by the sight of what seemed
to him so sumptuous and worldly a life, and he went to rest uneasily,
doubting whether God's blessing could go with it. But when he awoke on
the morrow of his first visit, he told his wife, in the language
of his sect, how glad he was "to find no condemnation; but on the
contrary, ability to put up fervent petitions with much tenderness on
behalf of this great luminary." It is at his country home that we like
best to think of Burke. It is still a touching picture to the historic
imagination to follow him from the heat and violence of the House,
where tipsy squires derided the greatest genius of his time, down to
the calm shades of Beaconsfield, where he would with his own hands
give food to a starving beggar, or medicine to a peasant sick of the
ague; where he would talk of the weather, the turnips, and the hay
with the team-men and the farm-bailiff; and where, in the evening
stillness, he would pace the walk under the trees, and reflect on the
state of Europe and the distractions of his country.