THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
We have now come to the second of the two momentous changes in the
world's affairs, in which Burke played an imposing and historic
part. His attitude in the first of them, the struggle for American
independence, commands almost without alloy the admiration and
reverence of posterity. His attitude in the second of them, the great
revolution in France, has raised controversies which can only be
compared in heat and duration to the master controversies of theology.
If the history of society were written as learned men write the
history of the Christian faith and its churches, Burke would figure in
the same strong prominence, whether deplorable or glorious, as Arius
and Athanasius, Augustine and Sabellius, Luther and Ignatius. If we
ask how it is that now, nearly a century after the event, men are
still discussing Burke's pamphlet on the Revolution as they are still
discussing Bishop Butler's _Analogy_, the answer is that in one case
as in the other the questions at issue are still unsettled, and that
Burke offers in their highest and most comprehensive form all the
considerations that belong to one side of the dispute. He was not of
those, of whom Coleridge said that they proceeded with much solemnity
to solve the riddle of the French Revolution by anecdotes. He
suspended it in the same light of great social ideas and wide
principles, in which its authors and champions professed to represent
it. Unhappily he advanced from criticism to practical exhortation, in
our opinion the most mischievous and indefensible that has ever been
pressed by any statesman on any nation. But the force of the criticism
remains, its foresight remains, its commemoration of valuable elements
of life which men were forgetting, its discernment of the limitations
of things, its sense of the awful emergencies of the problem. When our
grandchildren have made up their minds, once for all, as to the merits
of the social transformation which dawned on Europe in 1789, then
Burke's _Reflections_ will become a mere literary antiquity, and not
before.
From the very beginning Burke looked upon the proceedings in France
with distrust. He had not a moment of enthusiasm or sympathy of which
to repent. When the news reached England that the insurgents of Paris
had stormed the Bastille, Fox exclaimed with exultation, how much it
was the greatest event that had ever happened in the world, how much
the best. Is it an infirmity to wish for an instant that some such
phrase of generous hope had escaped from Burke; that he had for a day
or an hour undergone that fine illusion which was lighted up in the
spirits of men like Wordsworth and Coleridge? Those great poets,
who were destined one day to preach even a wiser and a loftier
conservatism than his own, have told us what they felt--
When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared,
And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea,
Stamped her strong foot, and said she would be free.
Burke from the first espied the looming shadow of a catastrophe. In
August he wrote to Lord Charlemont that the events in France had
something paradoxical and mysterious about them; that the outbreak of
the old Parisian ferocity might be no more than a sudden explosion,
but if it should happen to be _character_ rather than accident, then
the people would need a strong hand like that of their former masters
to coerce them; that all depended upon the French having wise heads
among them, and upon these wise heads, if such there were, acquiring
an authority to match their wisdom. There is nothing here but a calm
and sagacious suspense of judgment. It soon appeared that the old
Parisian ferocity was still alive. In the events of October 1789, when
the mob of Paris marched out to Versailles and marched back again with
the king and queen in triumphal procession, Burke felt in his heart
that the beginning of the end had come, and that the catastrophe was
already at hand. In October he wrote a long letter to the French
gentleman to whom he afterwards addressed the _Reflections_. "You
hope, sir," he said, "that I think the French deserving of liberty. I
certainly do. I certainly think that all men who desire it deserve it.
We cannot forfeit our right to it, but by what forfeits our title to
the privileges of our kind. The liberty I mean is _social_ freedom.
It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by equality
of restraint. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for
justice. _Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice,
neither is in my opinion safe_." The weightiest and most important of
all political truths, and worth half the fine things that poets
have sung about freedom--if it could only have been respected, how
different the course of the Revolution! But the engineer who attempts
to deal with the abysmal rush of the falls of Niagara, must put aside
the tools that constructed the Bridgewater Canal and the Chelsea
Waterworks. Nobody recognised so early as Burke that France had really
embarked among cataracts and boiling gulfs, and the pith of all his
first criticisms, including the _Reflections_, was the proposition
that to separate freedom from justice was nothing else than to steer
the ship of state direct into the Maelstrom. It is impossible to
deny that this was true. Unfortunately it was a truth which the wild
spirits that were then abroad in the storm made of no avail.
Destiny aimed an evil stroke when Burke, whose whole soul was bound up
in order, peace, and gently enlarged precedent, found himself face to
face with the portentous man-devouring Sphinx. He who could not endure
that a few clergymen should be allowed to subscribe to the Bible
instead of to the Articles, saw the ancient Church of Christendom
prostrated, its possessions confiscated, its priests proscribed, and
Christianity itself officially superseded. The economical reformer,
who when his zeal was hottest declined to discharge a tide-waiter or a
scullion in the royal kitchen who should have acquired the shadow of a
vested interest in his post, beheld two great orders stripped of
their privileges and deprived of much of their lands, though their
possession had been sanctified by the express voice of the laws and
the prescription of many centuries. He who was full of apprehension
and anger at the proposal to take away a member of Parliament from St.
Michael's or Old Sarum, had to look on while the most august monarchy
in Europe was overturned. The man who dreaded fanatics, hated
atheists, despised political theorisers, and was driven wild at the
notion of applying metaphysical rights and abstract doctrines to
public affairs, suddenly beheld a whole kingdom given finally up to
fanatics, atheists, and theorisers, who talked of nothing but the
rights of man, and deliberately set as wide a gulf as ruin and
bloodshed could make between themselves and every incident or
institution in the history of their land. The statesman who had once
declared, and habitually proved, his preference for peace over even
truth, who had all his life surrounded himself with a mental paradise
of order and equilibrium, in a moment found himself confronted by the
stupendous and awful spectre which a century of disorder had raised in
its supreme hour. It could not have been difficult for any one who had
studied Burke's character and career, to foretell all that now came to
pass with him.
It was from an English, and not from a French point of view, that
Burke was first drawn to write upon the Revolution. The 4th of
November was the anniversary of the landing of the Prince of Orange,
and the first act in the Revolution of 1688. The members of an
association which called itself the Revolution Society, chiefly
composed of Dissenters, but not without a mixture of Churchmen,
including a few peers and a good many members of the House of Commons,
met as usual to hear a sermon in commemoration of the glorious day.
Dr. Price was the preacher, and both in the morning sermon, and in
the speeches which followed in the festivities of the afternoon, the
French were held up to the loudest admiration, as having carried the
principles of our own Revolution to a loftier height, and having
opened boundless hopes to mankind. By these harmless proceedings
Burke's anger and scorn were aroused to a pitch which must seem to us,
as it seemed to not a few of his contemporaries, singularly out of all
proportion to its cause. Deeper things were doubtless in silent motion
within him. He set to work upon a denunciation of Price's doctrines,
with a velocity that reminds us of Aristotle's comparison of anger
to the over-hasty servant, who runs off with all speed before he
has listened to half the message. This was the origin of the
_Reflections_. The design grew as the writer went on. His imagination
took fire; his memory quickened a throng of impressive associations;
his excited vision revealed to him a band of vain, petulant upstarts
persecuting the ministers of a sacred religion, insulting a virtuous
and innocent sovereign, and covering with humiliation the august
daughter of the Caesars; his mind teemed with the sage maxims of the
philosophy of things established, and the precepts of the gospel of
order. Every courier that crossed the Channel supplied new material to
his contempt and his alarm. He condemned the whole method and course
of the French reforms. His judgment was in suspense no more. He no
longer distrusted; he hated, despised, and began to dread.
Men soon began to whisper abroad that Burke thought ill of what was
going on over the water. When it transpired that he was writing
a pamphlet, the world of letters was stirred with the liveliest
expectation. The name of the author, the importance of the subject,
and the singularity of his opinions, so Mackintosh informs us, all
inflamed the public curiosity. Soon after Parliament met for the
session (1790), the army estimates were brought up. Fox criticised the
increase of our forces, and incidentally hinted something in praise of
the French army, which had shown that a man could be a soldier without
ceasing to be a citizen. Some days afterwards the subject was revived,
and Pitt, as well as Fox, avowed himself hopeful of the good effect of
the Revolution upon the order and government of France. Burke followed
in a very different vein, openly proclaiming that dislike and fear of
the Revolution which was to be the one ceaseless refrain of all that
he spoke or wrote for the rest of his life. He deplored Fox's praise
of the army for breaking their lawful allegiance, and then he
proceeded with ominous words to the effect that, if any friend of his
should concur in any measures which should tend to introduce such a
democracy as that of France, he would abandon his best friends and
join with his worst enemies to oppose either the means or the end.
This has unanimously been pronounced one of the most brilliant and
effective speeches that Burke ever made. Fox rose with distress on
every feature, and made the often-quoted declaration of his debt to
Burke:--"If all the political information I have learned from books,
all which I have gained from science, and all which my knowledge of
the world and its affairs has taught me, were put into one scale, and
the improvement which I have derived from my right honourable friend's
instruction and conversation were placed in the other, I should be at
a loss to decide to which to give the preference. I have learnt more
from my right honourable friend than from all the men with whom I ever
conversed." All seemed likely to end in a spirit of conciliation until
Sheridan rose, and in the plainest terms that he could find, expressed
his dissent from everything that Burke had said. Burke immediately
renounced his friendship. For the first time in his life he found the
sympathy of the House vehemently on his side.
In the following month (March 1790) this unpromising incident was
succeeded by an aberration which no rational man will now undertake to
defend. Fox brought forward a motion for the repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts. He did this in accordance with a recent suggestion
of Burke's own, that he should strengthen his political position
by winning the support of the Dissenters. Burke himself had always
denounced the Test Act as bad, and as an abuse of sacred things. To
the amazement of everybody, and to the infinite scandal of his party,
he now pronounced the Dissenters to be disaffected citizens, and
refused to relieve them. Well might Fox say that Burke's words had
filled him with grief and shame.
Meanwhile the great rhetorical fabric gradually arose. Burke revised,
erased, moderated, strengthened, emphasised, wrote and re-wrote with
indefatigable industry. With the manuscript constantly under his
eyes, he lingered busily, pen in hand, over paragraphs and phrases,
antitheses and apophthegms. The _Reflections_ was no superb
improvisation. Its composition recalls Palma Giovine's account of the
mighty Titian's way of working; how the master made his preparations
with resolute strokes of a heavily-laden brush, and then turned his
picture to the wall, and by and by resumed again, and then again and
again, redressing, adjusting, modelling the light with a rub of his
finger, or dabbing a spot of dark colour into some corner with a
touch of his thumb, and finally working all his smirches, contrasts,
abruptnesses, into the glorious harmony that we know. Burke was so
unwearied in this insatiable correction and alteration that the
printer found it necessary, instead of making the changes marked upon
the proof-sheets, to set up the whole in type afresh. The work was
upon the easel for exactly a year. It was November (1790) before the
result came into the hands of the public. It was a small octavo of
three hundred and fifty-six pages, in contents rather less than twice
the present volume, bound in an unlettered wrapper of gray paper, and
sold for five shillings. In less than twelve months it reached its
eleventh edition, and it has been computed that not many short of
thirty thousand copies were sold within the next six years.
The first curiosity had languished in the course of the long delay,
but it was revived in its strongest force when the book itself
appeared. A remarkable effect instantly followed. Before the
_Reflections_ was published the predominant sentiment in England had
been one of mixed astonishment and sympathy. Pitt had expressed this
common mood both in the House of Commons and in private. It was
impossible for England not to be amazed at the uprising of a nation
whom they had been accustomed to think of as willing slaves, and
it was impossible for her, when the scene did not happen to be the
American colonies or Ireland, not to profess good wishes for the cause
of emancipation all over the world. Apart from the natural admiration
of a free people for a neighbour struggling to be free, England saw
no reason to lament a blow to a sovereign and a government who had
interfered on the side of her insurgent colonies. To this easy state
of mind Burke's book put an immediate end. At once, as contemporaries
assure us, it divided the nation into two parties. On both sides it
precipitated opinion. With a long-resounding blast on his golden
trumpet Burke had unfurled a new flag, and half the nation hurried to
rally to it--that half which had scouted his views on America, which
had bitterly disliked his plan of Economic Reform, which had mocked
his ideas on religious toleration, and which a moment before had hated
and reviled him beyond all men living for his fierce tenacity in the
impeachment of Warren Hastings. The king said to everybody who came
near him that the book was a good book, a very good book, and every
gentleman ought to read it. The universities began to think of
offering the scarlet gown of their most honourable degree to the
assailant of Price and the Dissenters. The great army of the indolent
good, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason,
took violent alarm. The timorous, the weak-minded, the bigoted, were
suddenly awakened to a sense of what they owed to themselves. Burke
gave them the key which enabled them to interpret the Revolution in
harmony with their usual ideas and their temperament.
Reaction quickly rose to a high pitch. One preacher in a parish church
in the neighbourhood of London celebrated the anniversary of the
restoration of King Charles II. by a sermon, in which the pains of
eternal damnation were confidently promised to political disaffection.
Romilly, mentioning to a friend that the _Reflections_ had got into a
fourteenth edition, wondered whether Burke was not rather ashamed of
his success. It is when we come to the rank and file of reaction, that
we find it hard to forgive the man of genius who made himself the
organ of their selfishness, their timidity, and their blindness. We
know, alas, that the parts of his writings on French affairs to which
they would fly, were not likely to be the parts which calm men now
read with sympathy, but the scoldings, the screamings, the unworthy
vituperation with which, especially in the latest of them, he attacked
everybody who took part in the Revolution, from Condorcet and
Lafayette down to Marat and Couthon. It was the feet of clay that they
adored in their image, and not the head of fine gold and the breasts
and the arms of silver.
On the continent of Europe the excitement was as great among the
ruling classes as it was at home. Mirabeau, who had made Burke's
acquaintance some years before in England, and even been his guest at
Beaconsfield, now made the _Reflections_ the text of more than one
tremendous philippic. Louis XVI. is said to have translated the book
into French with his own hand. Catherine of Russia, Voltaire's adored
Semiramis of the North, the benefactress of Diderot, the ready helper
of the philosophic party, pressed her congratulations on the great
pontiff of the old order, who now thundered anathema against the
philosophers and all their works.
It is important to remember the stage which the Revolution had
reached, when Burke was composing his attack upon it. The year 1790
was precisely the time when the hopes of the best men in France shone
most brightly, and seemed most reasonable. There had been disorders,
and Paris still had ferocity in her mien. But Robespierre was an
obscure figure on the back benches of the Assembly. Nobody had ever
heard of Danton. The name of Republic had never been so much as
whispered. The king still believed that constitutional monarchy would
leave him as much power as he desired. He had voluntarily gone to the
National Assembly, and in simple language had exhorted them all to
imitate his example by professing the single opinion, the single
interest, the single wish--attachment to the new constitution, and
ardent desire for the peace and happiness of France. The clergy, it is
true, were violently irritated by the spoliation of their goods, and
the nobles had crossed the Rhine, to brood impotently in the safety
of Coblenz over projects of a bloody revenge upon their country. But
France, meanwhile, paid little heed either to the anger of the clergy
or the menaces of the emigrant nobles, and at the very moment when
Burke was writing his most sombre pages, Paris and the provinces were
celebrating with transports of joy and enthusiasm the civic oath,
the federation, the restoration of concord to the land, the final
establishment of freedom and justice in a regenerated France. This was
the happy scene over which Burke suddenly stretched out the right arm
of an inspired prophet, pointing to the cloud of thunder and darkness
that was gathering on the hills, and proclaiming to them the doom that
had been written upon the wall by the fingers of an inexorable hand.
It is no wonder that when the cloud burst and the doom was fulfilled,
men turned to Burke, as they went of old to Ahithophel, whose counsel
was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God.
It is not to our purpose to discuss all the propositions advanced in
the _Reflections_, much less to reply to them. The book is like
some temple, by whose structure and design we allow ourselves to be
impressed, without being careful to measure the precise truth or
fitness of the worship to which it was consecrated by its first
founders. Just as the student of the _Politics_ of Aristotle may well
accept all the wisdom of it, without caring to protest at every turn
against slavery as the basis of a society, so we may well cherish all
the wisdom of the _Reflections_, at this distance of time, without
marking as a rubric on every page that half of these impressive
formulae and inspiring declamations were irrelevant to the occasion
which called them forth, and exercised for the hour an influence that
was purely mischievous. Time permits to us this profitable lenity. In
reading this, the first of his invectives, it is important, for the
sake of clearness of judgment, to put from our minds the practical
policy which Burke afterwards so untiringly urged upon his countrymen.
As yet there is no exhortation to England to interfere. We still
listen to the voice of the statesman, and are not deafened by the
passionate cries of the preacher of a crusade. When Burke wrote the
_Reflections_ he was justified in criticising the Revolution as
an extraordinary movement, but still a movement professing to be
conducted on the principles of rational and practicable politics. They
were the principles to which competent onlookers like Jefferson and
Morris had expected the Assembly to conform, but to which the Assembly
never conformed for an instant. It was on the principles of rational
politics that Fox and Sheridan admired it. On these principles
Burke condemned it. He declared that the methods of the Constituent
Assembly, up to the summer of 1790, were unjust, precipitate,
destructive, and without stability. Men had chosen to build their
house on the sands, and the winds and the seas would speedily beat
against it and overthrow it.
His prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. What is still more important
for the credit of his foresight is, that not only did his prophecy
come true, but it came true for the reasons that he had fixed upon. It
was, for instance, the constitution of the Church, in which Burke
saw the worst of the many bad mistakes of the Assembly. History, now
slowly shaking herself free from the passions of a century, agrees
that the civil constitution of the clergy was the measure which, more
than any other, decisively put an end to whatever hopes there might
have been of a peaceful transition from the old order to the new.
A still more striking piece of foresight is the prediction of the
despotism of the Napoleonic Empire. Burke had compared the levelling
policy of the Assembly in their geometrical division of the
departments, and their isolation from one another of the bodies of
the state, to the treatment which a conquered country receives at the
hands of its conquerors. Like Romans in Greece or Macedon, the French
innovators had destroyed the bonds of union, under colour of providing
for the independence of each of their cities. "If the present project
of a Republic should fail," Burke said, with a prescience really
profound, "all securities to a moderate freedom fail with it. All the
indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed; insomuch
that, if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in
France under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not
voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise and virtuous counsels
of the prince, the most completely arbitrary power that ever appeared
on earth." Almost at the same moment Mirabeau was secretly writing to
the king that their plan of reducing all citizens to a single
class would have delighted Richelieu. This equal surface, he said,
facilitates the exercise of power, and many reigns in an absolute
government would not have done as much as this single year of
revolution, for the royal authority. Time showed that Burke and
Mirabeau were right.
History ratifies nearly all Burke's strictures on the levity and
precipitancy of the first set of actors in the revolutionary drama. No
part of the _Reflections_ is more energetic than the denunciation of
geometric and literary methods; and these are just what the modern
explorer hits upon, as one of the fatal secrets of the catastrophe.
De Tocqueville's chapter on the causes which made literary men the
principal persons in France, and the effect which this had upon the
Revolution (Bk. III. ch. i.), is only a little too cold to be able
to pass for Burke's own. Quinet's work on the Revolution is one
long sermon, full of eloquence and cogency, upon the incapacity and
blindness of the men who undertook the conduct of a tremendous crisis
upon mere literary methods, without the moral courage to obey the
logic of their beliefs, with the student's ignorance of the eager
passion and rapid imagination of multitudes of men, with the pedant's
misappreciation of a people, of whom it has been said by one of
themselves, that there never was a nation more led by its sensations
and less by its principles. Comte, again, points impressively to
the Revolution as the period which illustrates more decisively
than another the peril of confounding the two great functions of
speculation and political action: and he speaks with just reprobation
of the preposterous idea in the philosophic politicians of the
epoch, that society was at their disposal, independent of its past
development, devoid of inherent impulses, and easily capable of being
morally regenerated by the mere modification of legislative rules.
What then was it that, in the midst of so much perspicacity as to
detail, blinded Burke at the time when he wrote the _Reflections_ to
the true nature of the movement? Is it not this, that he judges the
Revolution as the solution of a merely political question? If the
Revolution had been merely political, his judgment would have been
adequate. The question was much deeper. It was a social question that
burned under the surface of what seemed no more than a modification of
external arrangements. That Burke was alive to the existence of social
problems, and that he was even tormented by them, we know from an
incidental passage in the _Reflections_. There he tells us how often
he had reflected, and never reflected without feeling, upon the
innumerable servile and degrading occupations to which by the social
economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. He had pondered
whether there could be any means of rescuing these unhappy people from
their miserable industry without disturbing the natural course of
things, and impeding the great wheel of circulation which is turned by
their labour. This is the vein of that striking passage in his first
composition which I have already quoted (p. 22). Burke did not
yet see, and probably never saw, that one key to the events which
astonished and exasperated him was simply that the persons most
urgently concerned had taken the riddle which perplexed him into their
own hands, and had in fiery earnest set about their own deliverance.
The pith of the Revolution up to 1790 was less the political
constitution, of which Burke says so much, and so much that is true,
than the social and economic transformation, of which he says so
little. It was not a question of the power of the king, or the measure
of an electoral circumscription, that made the Revolution; it was
the iniquitous distribution of the taxes, the scourge of the militia
service, the scourge of the road service, the destructive tyranny
exercised in the vast preserves of wild game, the vexatious rights and
imposts of the lords of manors, and all the other odious burdens and
heavy impediments on the prosperity of the thrifty and industrious
part of the nation. If he had seen ever so clearly that one of the
most important sides of the Revolution in progress was the rescue of
the tiller of the soil, Burke would still doubtless have viewed events
with bitter suspicion. For the process could not be executed without
disturbing the natural course of things, and without violating his
principle that all changes should find us with our minds tenacious of
justice and tender of property. A closer examination than he chose to
give of the current administration alike of justice and of property
under the old system, would have explained to him that an hour had
come in which the spirit of property and of justice compelled a
supersession of the letter.
If Burke had insisted on rigidly keeping sensibility to the wrongs of
the French people out of the discussion, on the ground that the whole
subject was one for positive knowledge and logical inference, his
position would have been intelligible and defensible. He followed no
such course. His pleading turns constantly to arguments from feeling;
but it is always to feeling on one side, and to a sensibility that is
only alive to the consecrated force of historic associations. How much
pure and uncontrolled emotion had to do with what ought to have
been the reasoned judgments of his understanding we know on his own
evidence. He had sent the proof-sheets of a part of his book to Sir
Philip Francis. They contained the famous passage describing the
French queen as he had seen her seventeen years before at Versailles.
Francis bluntly wrote to him that, in his opinion, all Burke's
eloquence about Marie Antoinette was no better than pure foppery, and
he referred to the queen herself as no better than Messalina. Burke
was so excited by this that his son, in a rather officious letter,
begged Francis not to repeat such stimulating remonstrance. What is
interesting in the incident is Burke's own reply. He knew nothing,
he said, of the story of Messalina, and declined the obligation of
proving judicially the virtues of all those whom he saw suffering
wrong and contumely, before he endeavoured to interest others in their
sufferings, and before endeavouring to kindle horror against midnight
assassins at backstairs and their more wicked abettors in pulpits. And
then he went on, "I tell you again that the recollection of the manner
in which I saw the Queen of France in the year 1774 [1773], and the
contrast between that brilliancy, splendour, and beauty, with the
prostrate homage of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1789
which I was describing, _did_ draw tears from me and wetted my paper.
These tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I looked at the
description--they may again."
The answer was obvious. It was well to pity the unmerited agonies of
Marie Antoinette, though as yet, we must remember, she had suffered
nothing beyond the indignities of the days of October at Versailles.
But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute of
a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage, and forget
the dying bird? The bulk of the people must labour, Burke told them,
"to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they
commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, they must
be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal
justice." When we learn that a Lyons silk weaver, working as hard as
he could for over seventeen hours a day, could not earn money enough
to procure the most bare and urgent necessaries of subsistence, we may
know with what benignity of brow eternal justice must have presented
herself in the garret of that hapless wretch. It was no idle
abstraction, no metaphysical right of man for which the Trench cried,
but only the practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, to
save themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger and
cruel death. The _mainmortable_ serfs of ecclesiastics are variously
said to have been a million and a million and a half at the time of
the Revolution. Burke's horror, as he thought of the priests and
prelates who left palaces and dignities to earn a scanty living by the
drudgery of teaching their language in strange lands, should have been
alleviated by the thought that a million or more of men were rescued
from ghastly material misery. Are we to be so overwhelmed with sorrow
over the pitiful destiny of the men of exalted rank and sacred
function, as to have no tears for the forty thousand serfs in the
gorges of the Jura, who were held in dead-hand by the Bishop of
Saint-Claude?
The simple truth is that Burke did not know enough of the subject
about which he was writing. When he said, for instance, that the
French before 1789 possessed all the elements of a constitution that
might be made nearly as good as could be wished, he said what many of
his contemporaries knew, and what all subsequent investigation and
meditation have proved, to be recklessly ill-considered and untrue. As
to the social state of France, his information was still worse. He saw
the dangers and disorders of the new system, but he saw a very little
way indeed into the more cruel dangers and disorders of the old.
Mackintosh replied to the _Reflections_ with manliness and temperance
in the _Vindicicae Gallicae_. Thomas Paine replied to them with an
energy, courage, and eloquence worthy of his cause, in the _Rights of
Man_. But the substantial and decisive reply to Burke came from his
former correspondent, the farmer at Bradfield in Suffolk. Arthur Young
published his _Travels in France_ some eighteen months after the
_Reflections_ (1792), and the pages of the twenty-first chapter in
which he closes his performance, as a luminous criticism of the most
important side of the Revolution, are worth a hundred times more than
Burke, Mackintosh, and Paine all put together. Young afterwards became
panic-stricken, but his book remained. There the writer plainly
enumerates without trope or invective the intolerable burdens under
which the great mass of the French people had for long years been
groaning. It was the removal of these burdens that made the very
heart's core of the Revolution, and gave to France that new life which
so soon astonished and terrified Europe. Yet Burke seems profoundly
unconscious of the whole of them. He even boldly asserts that, when
the several orders met in their bailliages in 1789, to choose their
representatives and draw up their grievances and instructions, in no
one of these instructions did they charge, or even hint at, any
of those things which had drawn upon the usurping Assembly the
detestation of the rational part of mankind. He could not have made a
more enormous blunder. There was not a single great change made by the
Assembly, which had not been demanded in the lists of grievances that
had been sent up by the nation to Versailles. The division of the
kingdom into districts, and the proportioning of the representation
to taxes and population; the suppression of the intendants; the
suppression of all monks and the sale of their goods and estates; the
abolition of feudal rights, duties, and services; the alienation of
the king's domains; the demolition of the Bastille; these and all else
were in the prayers of half the petitions that the country had laid at
the feet of the king.
If this were merely an incidental blunder in a fact, it might be of no
importance. But it was a blunder which went to the very root of the
discussion. The fact that France was now at the back of the Assembly,
inspiring its counsels and ratifying its decrees, was the cardinal
element, and that is the fact which at this stage Burke systematically
ignored. That he should have so ignored it, left him in a curious
position, for it left him without any rational explanation of the
sources of the policy which kindled his indignation and contempt. A
publicist can never be sure of his position until he can explain to
himself even what he does not wish to justify to others. Burke thought
it enough to dwell upon the immense number of lawyers in the Assembly,
and to show that lawyers are naturally bad statesmen. He did not look
the state of things steadily in the face. It was no easy thing to do,
but Burke was a man who ought to have done it. He set all down to the
ignorance, folly, and wickedness of the French leaders. This was as
shallow as the way in which his enemies, the philosophers, used to set
down the superstition of eighteen centuries to the craft of priests,
and all defects in the government of Europe to the cruelty of tyrants.
How it came about that priests and tyrants acquired their irresistible
power over men's minds, they never inquired. And Burke never inquired
into the enthusiastic acquiescence of the nation, and, what was
most remarkable of all, the acquiescence of the army, in the strong
measures of the Assembly. Burke was in truth so appalled by the
magnitude of the enterprise on which France had embarked, that
he utterly forgot for once the necessity in political affairs of
seriously understanding the originating conditions of things. He was
strangely content with the explanations that came from the malignants
at Coblenz, and he actually told Francis that he charged the disorders
not on the mob, but on the Duke of Orleans and Mirabeau, on Barnave
and Bailly, on Lameth and Lafayette, who had spent immense sums of
money, and used innumerable arts, to stir up the populace throughout
France to the commission of the enormities that were shocking the
conscience of Europe. His imagination broke loose. His practical
reason was mastered by something that was deeper in him than reason.
This brings me to remark a really singular trait. In spite of the
predominance of practical sagacity, of the habits and spirit of public
business, of vigorous actuality in Burke's character, yet at the
bottom of all his thoughts about communities and governments there
lay a certain mysticism. It was no irony, no literary trope, when
he talked of our having taught the American husbandman "piously to
believe in the mysterious virtue of wax and parchment." He was using
no idle epithet, when he described the disposition of a stupendous
wisdom, "moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the
human race." To him there actually was an element of mystery in the
cohesion of men in societies, in political obedience, in the sanctity
of contract; in all that fabric of law and charter and obligation,
whether written or unwritten, which is the sheltering bulwark between
civilisation and barbarism. When reason and history had contributed
all that they could to the explanation, it seemed to him as if the
vital force, the secret of organisation, the binding framework, must
still come from the impenetrable regions beyond reasoning and beyond
history. There was another great conservative writer of that age,
whose genius was aroused into a protest against the revolutionary
spirit as vehement as Burke's. This was Joseph de Maistre, one of the
most learned, witty, and acute of all reactionary philosophers.
De Maistre wrote a book on the Generative Principle of Political
Constitutions. He could only find this principle in the operation of
occult and supernatural forces, producing the half-divine legislators
who figure mysteriously in the early history of nations. Hence he
held, and with astonishing ingenuity enforced, the doctrine that
nothing else could deliver Europe from the Satanic forces of
revolution--he used the word Satanic in all literal seriousness--save
the divinely inspired supremacy of the Pope. No natural operations
seemed at all adequate either to produce or to maintain the marvel
of a coherent society. We are reminded of a professor who, in the
fantastic days of geology, explained the Pyramids of Egypt to be the
remains of a volcanic eruption, which had forced its way upwards by a
slow and stately motion; the hieroglyphs were crystalline formations;
and the shaft of the great Pyramid was the air-hole of a volcano. De
Maistre preferred a similar explanation of the monstrous structures
of modern society. The hand of man could never have reared, and could
never uphold them. If we cannot say that Burke laboured in constant
travail with the same perplexity, it is at least true that he was
keenly alive to it, and that one of the reasons why he dreaded to see
a finger laid upon a single stone of a single political edifice, was
his consciousness that he saw no answer to the perpetual enigma how
any of these edifices had ever been built, and how the passion,
violence, and waywardness of the natural man had ever been persuaded
to bow their necks to the strong yoke of a common social discipline.
Never was mysticism more unseasonable; never was an hour when men
needed more carefully to remember Burke's own wise practical precept,
when he was talking about the British rule in India, that we must
throw a sacred veil over the beginnings of government. Many woes might
perhaps have been saved to Europe, if Burke had applied this maxim to
the government of the new France.
Much has always been said about the inconsistency between Burke's
enmity to the Revolution and his enmity to Lord North in one set of
circumstances, and to Warren Hastings in another. The pamphleteers of
the day made selections from the speeches and tracts of his happier
time, and the seeming contrast had its effect. More candid opponents
admitted then, as all competent persons admit now, that the
inconsistency was merely verbal and superficial. Watson, the Bishop of
Llandaff, was only one of many who observed very early that this was
the unmistakable temper of Burke's mind. "I admired, as everybody
did," he said, "the talents, but not the principles of Mr. Burke; his
opposition to the Clerical Petition [for relaxation of subscription,
1772], first excited my suspicion of his being a High Churchman in
religion, and a Tory, perhaps an aristocratic Tory, in the state."
Burke had indeed never been anything else than a conservative. He was
like Falkland, who had bitterly assailed Strafford and Finch on the
same principles on which, after the outbreak of the civil war, he
consented to be secretary of state to King Charles. Coleridge is borne
out by a hundred passages, when he says that in Burke's writings at
the beginning of the American Revolution and in those at the beginning
of the French Revolution, the principles are the same and the
deductions are the same; the practical inferences are almost opposite
in the one case from those drawn in the other, yet in both equally
legitimate. It would be better to say that they would have been
equally legitimate, if Burke had been as right in his facts, and as
ample in his knowledge in the case of France, as he was in the case of
America. We feel, indeed, that partly from want of this knowledge, he
has gone too far from some of the wise maxims of an earlier time.
What has become of the doctrine that all great public collections of
men--he was then speaking of the House of Commons--"possess a marked
love of virtue and an abhorrence of vice."[1] Why was the French
Assembly not to have the benefit of this admirable generalisation?
What has become of all those sayings about the presumption, in all
disputes between nations and rulers, "being at least upon a par in
favour of the people;" and a populace never rebelling from passion for
attack, but from impatience of suffering? And where is now that strong
dictum, in the letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, that "general
rebellions and revolts of a whole people never were _encouraged_, now
or at any time; they are always _provoked_"?
[Footnote 1: _American Taxation_.]
When all these things have been noted, to hold a man to his formulae
without reference to their special application, is pure pedantry.
Burke was the last man to lay down any political proposition not
subject to the ever varying interpretation of circumstances, and
independently of the particular use which was to be made of it.
Nothing universal, he had always said, can be rationally affirmed on
any moral or political subject. The lines of morality, again, are
never ideal lines of mathematics, but are broad and deep as well as
long, admitting of exceptions, and demanding modifications. "These
exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic,
but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank
of the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, the
regulator, the standard of them all. As no moral questions are
ever abstract questions, this, before I judge upon any abstract
proposition, must be embodied in circumstances; for, since things
are right and wrong, morally speaking, only by their relation and
connection with other things, this very question of what it is
politically right to grant, depends upon its relation to its effects."
"Circumstances," he says, never weary of laying down his great notion
of political method, "give, in reality, to every political principle
its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances
are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or
obnoxious to mankind."
This is at once the weapon with which he would have defended his own
consistency, and attacked the absolute proceedings in France. He
changed his front, but he never changed his ground. He was not more
passionate against the proscription in France, than he had been
against the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the American war. "I
flatter myself," he said in the _Reflections_, "that I love a manly,
moral, regulated liberty." Ten years before he had said, "The liberty,
the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order." The court
tried to regulate liberty too severely. It found in him an inflexible
opponent. Demagogues tried to remove the regulations of liberty.
They encountered in him the bitterest and most unceasing of all
remonstrants. The arbitrary majority in the House of Commons forgot
for whose benefit they held power, from whom they derived their
authority, and in what description of government it was that they had
a place. Burke was the most valiant and strenuous champion in the
ranks of the independent minority. He withstood to the face the king
and the king's friends. He withstood to the face Charles Fox and the
Friends of the People. He may have been wrong in both, or in either,
but it is unreasonable to tell us that he turned back in his course;
that he was a revolutionist in 1770, and a reactionist in 1790; that
he was in his sane mind when he opposed the supremacy of the Court,
but that his reason was tottering when he opposed the supremacy of the
Faubourg Saint Antoine.
There is no part of Burke's career at which we may not find evidence
of his instinctive and undying repugnance to the critical or
revolutionary spirit and all its works. From the early days when he
had parodied Bolingbroke, down to the later time when he denounced
Condorcet as a fanatical atheist, with "every disposition to the
lowest as well as the highest and most determined villainies," he
invariably suspected or denounced everybody, virtuous or vicious,
high-minded or ignoble, who inquired with too keen a scrutiny into the
foundations of morals, of religion, of social order. To examine with a
curious or unfavourable eye the bases of established opinions, was to
show a leaning to anarchy, to atheism, or to unbridled libertinism.
Already we have seen how, three years after the publication of his
_Thoughts on the Present Discontents_, and seventeen years before the
composition of the _Reflections_, he denounced the philosophers with
a fervour and a vehemence which he never afterwards surpassed. When
a few of the clergy petitioned to be relieved from some of the
severities of subscription, he had resisted them on the bold ground
that the truth of a proposition deserves less attention than the
effect of adherence to it upon the established order of things. "I
will not enter into the question," he told the House of Commons, "how
much truth is preferable to peace. Perhaps truth may be far better.
But as we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that we
have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold
fast to peace." In that intellectual restlessness, to which the world
is so deeply indebted, Burke could recognise but scanty merit. Himself
the most industrious and active-minded of men, he was ever sober in
cutting the channels of his activity, and he would have had others
equally moderate. Perceiving that plain and righteous conduct is the
end of life in this world, he prayed men not to be over-curious in
searching for, and handling, and again handling, the theoretic base
on which the prerogatives of virtue repose. Provided that there was
peace, that is to say, so much of fair happiness and content as is
compatible with the conditions of the human lot, Burke felt that a
too great inquisitiveness as to its foundations was not only idle but
cruel.
If the world continues to read the _Reflections_, and reads it with a
new admiration that is not diminished by the fact that on the special
issue its tendency is every day more clearly discerned to have been
misleading, we may be sure that it is not for the sake of such things
as the precise character of the Revolution of 1688, where, for that
matter, constitutional writers have shown abundantly that Burke was
nearly as much in the wrong as Dr. Sacheverell. Nor has the book lived
merely by its gorgeous rhetoric and high emotions, though these have
been contributing elements. It lives because it contains a sentiment,
a method, a set of informal principles, which, awakened into new life
after the Revolution, rapidly transformed the current ways of thinking
and feeling about all the most serious objects of our attention,
and have powerfully helped to give a richer substance to all modern
literature. In the _Reflections_ we have the first great sign that
the ideas on government and philosophy which Locke had been the chief
agent in setting into European circulation, and which had carried all
triumphantly before them throughout the century, did not comprehend
the whole truth nor the deepest truth about human character--the
relations of men and the union of men in society. It has often been
said that the armoury from which the French philosophers of the
eighteenth century borrowed their weapons was furnished from England,
and it may be added as truly that the reaction against that whole
scheme of thought came from England. In one sense we may call the
_Reflections_ a political pamphlet, but it is much more than this,
just as the movement against which it was levelled was much more than
a political movement. The Revolution rested on a philosophy, and
Burke confronted it with an antagonistic philosophy. Those are but
superficial readers who fail to see at how many points Burke, while
seeming only to deal with the French monarchy and the British
constitution, with Dr. Price and Marie Antoinette, was in fact, and
exactly because he dealt with them in the comprehensive spirit of true
philosophy, turning men's minds to an attitude from which not only the
political incidents of the hour, but the current ideas about religion,
psychology, the very nature of human knowledge, would all be seen in
a changed light and clothed in new colour. All really profound
speculation about society comes in time to touch the heart of every
other object of speculation, not by directly contributing new truths
or directly corroborating old ones, but by setting men to consider the
consequences to life of different opinions on these abstract subjects,
and their relations to the great paramount interests of society,
however those interests may happen at the time to be conceived.
Burke's book marks a turning-point in literary history, because it was
the signal for that reaction over the whole field of thought, into
which the Revolution drove many of the finest minds of the
next generation, by showing the supposed consequences of pure
individualistic rationalism.
We need not attempt to work out the details of this extension of a
political reaction into a universal reaction in philosophy and poetry.
Any one may easily think out for himself what consequences in act
and thought, as well as in government, would be likely to flow, for
example, from one of the most permanently admirable sides of Burke's
teaching--his respect for the collective reason of men, and his
sense of the impossibility in politics and morals of considering the
individual apart from the experience of the race. "We are afraid," he
says, "to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of
reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,
and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the
general bank and capital of nations and of ages. _Many of our men of
speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their
sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them_. If
they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more
wise to continue the prejudice with the reason involved, than to cast
away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason:
because prejudice with its reason has a motive to give action to that
reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is
of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind
in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the
man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and
unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a
series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a
part of his nature." Is not this to say, in other words, that in every
man the substantial foundations of action consist of the accumulated
layers which various generations of ancestors have placed for him;
that the greater part of our sentiments act most effectively when they
act most mechanically, and by the methods of an unquestioned system;
that although no rule of conduct or spring of action ought to endure,
which does not repose in sound reason, yet this naked reason is in
itself a less effective means of influencing action than when it
exists as one part of a fabric of ancient and endeared association?
Interpreted by a mobile genius, and expanded by a poetic imagination,
all this became the foundation from which the philosophy of Coleridge
started, and, as Mill has shown in a famous essay, Coleridge was the
great apostle of the conservative spirit in England in its best form.
Though Burke here, no doubt, found a true base for the philosophy of
order, yet perhaps Condorcet or Barnave might have justly asked him
whether, when we thus realise the strong and immovable foundations
which are laid in our character before we are born, there could be any
occasion, as a matter of fact, for that vehement alarm which moved
Burke lest a few lawyers, by a score of parchment decrees, should
overthrow the venerated sentiments of Europe about justice and about
property? Should he not have known better than most men the force of
the self-protecting elements of society?
This is not a convenient place for discussing the issues between the
school of order and the school of progress. It is enough to have
marked Burke's position in one of them. The _Reflections_ places him
among the great Conservatives of history. Perhaps the only Englishman
with whom in this respect he may be compared, is Sir Thomas
More,--that virtuous and eloquent reactionist of the sixteenth
century. More abounded in light, in intellectual interests, in
single-minded care for the common weal. He was as anxious as any man
of his time for the improved ordering of the Church, but he could not
endure that reformation should be bought at the price of breaking up
the ancient spiritual unity of Europe. He was willing to slay and be
slain rather than he would tolerate the destruction of the old faith,
or assent to the violence of the new statecraft. He viewed Thomas
Cromwell's policy of reformation, just as Burke viewed Mirabeau's
policy of revolution. Burke too, we may be very sure, would as
willingly have sent Mirabeau and Bailly to prison or the block as More
sent Phillips to the Tower and Bainham to the stake. For neither More
nor Burke was of the gentle contemplative spirit, which the first
disorder of a new society just bursting into life merely overshadows
with saddening regrets and poetic gloom. The old harmony was to them
so bound up with the purpose and meaning of life, that to wage active
battle for the gods of their reverence was the irresistible instinct
of self-preservation. More had an excuse which Burke had not, for
the principle of persecution was accepted by the best minds of the
sixteenth century, but by the best minds of the eighteenth it was
emphatically repudiated.
Another illustrious name of Burke's own era rises to our lips, as we
ponder mentally the too scanty list of those who have essayed the
great and hardy task of reconciling order with progress. Turgot is
even a more imposing figure than Burke himself. The impression made
upon us by the pair is indeed very different, for Turgot was austere,
reserved, distant, a man of many silences and much suspense; while
Burke, as we know, was imaginative, exuberant, unrestrained, and, like
some of the greatest actors on the stage of human affairs, he had
associated his own personality with the prevalence of right ideas and
good influences. In Turgot, on the other hand, we discern something of
the isolation, the sternness, the disdainful melancholy of Tacitus.
He even rises out of the eager, bustling, shrill-tongued crowd of the
Voltairean age with some of that austere moral indignation and haughty
astonishment with which Dante had watched the stubborn ways of men
centuries before. On one side Turgot shared the conservatism of
Burke, though, perhaps, he would hardly have given it that name. He
habitually corrected the headlong insistence of the revolutionary
philosophers, his friends, by reminding them that neither pity, nor
benevolence, nor hope can ever dispense with justice; and he could
never endure to hear of great changes being wrought at the cost of
this sovereign quality. Like Burke, he held fast to the doctrine that
everything must be done for the multitude, but nothing by them. Like
Burke, he realised how close are the links that bind the successive
generations of men, and make up the long chain of human history. Like
Burke, he never believed that the human mind has any spontaneous
inclination to welcome pure truth. Here, however, is visible between
them a hard line of division. It is not error, said Turgot, which
opposes the progress of truth; it is indolence, obstinacy, and the
spirit of routine. But then Turgot enjoined upon us to make it the aim
of life to do battle in ourselves and others with all this indolence,
obstinacy, and spirit of routine in the world; while Burke, on the
contrary, gave to these bad things gentler names, he surrounded them
with the picturesque associations of the past, and in the great
world-crisis of his time he threw all his passion and all his genius
on their side. Will any reader doubt which of these two types of the
school of order and justice, both of them noble, is the more valuable
for the race, and the worthier and more stimulating ideal for the
individual?
It is not certain that Burke was not sometimes for a moment startled
by the suspicion that he might unawares be fighting against the truth.
In the midst of flaming and bitter pages, we now and again feel a cool
breath from the distant region of a half-pensive tolerance. "I do not
think," he says at the close of the _Reflections_, to the person to
whom they were addressed, "that my sentiments are likely to alter
yours. I do not know that they ought. You are young; you cannot guide,
but must follow, the fortune of your country. But hereafter they may
be of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealth
may take. In the present it can hardly remain; but before its final
settlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says,
'through great varieties of untried being,' and in all its
transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood."
He felt in the midst of his hate that what he took for seething chaos,
might after all be the struggle upwards of the germs of order. Among
the later words that he wrote on the Revolution were these:--"If a
great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be
fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way.
Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in
opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to
resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of
men." We can only regret that these rays of the _mens divinior_ did
not shine with a more steadfast light; and that a spirit which, amid
the sharp press of manifold cares and distractions, had ever vibrated
with lofty sympathies, was not now more constant to its faith in the
beneficent powers and processes of the Unseen Time.