BURKE'S LITERARY CHARACTER
A story is told that in the time when Burke was still at peace with
the Dissenters, he visited Priestley, and after seeing his library
and his laboratory, and hearing how his host's hours were given to
experiment and meditation, he exclaimed that such a life must make
him the happiest and most to be envied of men. It must sometimes have
occurred to Burke to wonder whether he had made the right choice when
he locked away the fragments of his History, and plunged into the
torment of party and Parliament. But his interests and aptitudes were
too strong and overmastering for him to have been right in doing
otherwise. Contact with affairs was an indispensable condition for
the full use of his great faculties, in spite of their being less
faculties of affairs than of speculation. Public life was the actual
field in which to test, and work out, and use with good effect the
moral ideas which were Burke's most sincere and genuine interests. And
he was able to bring these moral ideas into such effective use because
he was so entirely unfettered by the narrowing spirit of formula. No
man, for instance, who thought in formulae would have written the
curious passage that I have already referred to, in which he eulogises
gin, because "under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our
mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries called
in some physical aid to their moral consolation." He valued words at
their proper rate, that is to say, he knew that some of the greatest
facts in the life and character of man, and in the institutions of
society, can find no description and no measurement in words. Public
life, as we can easily perceive, with its shibboleths, its exclusive
parties, its measurement by conventional standards, its attention to
small expediencies before the larger ones, is not a field where such
characteristics are likely to make an instant effect.
Though it is not wrong to say of Burke that as an orator he was
transcendent, yet in that immediate influence upon his hearers which
is commonly supposed to be the mark of oratorical success, all the
evidence is that Burke generally failed. We have seen how his speech
against Hastings affected Miss Burney, and how the speech on the Nabob
of Arcot's debts was judged by Pitt not to be worth answering. Perhaps
the greatest that he ever made was that on conciliation with America;
the wisest in its temper, the most closely logical in its reasoning,
the amplest in appropriate topics, the most generous and conciliatory
in the substance of its appeals. Yet Erskine, who was in the House
when this was delivered, said that it drove everybody away, including
people who, when they came to read it, read it over and over again,
and could hardly think of anything else. As Moore says rather too
floridly, but with truth,--"In vain did Burke's genius put forth
its superb plumage, glittering all over with the hundred eyes of
fancy--the gait of the bird was heavy and awkward, and its voice
seemed rather to scare than attract." Burke's gestures were clumsy; he
had sonorous but harsh tones; he never lost a strong Irish accent;
and his utterance was often hurried and eager. Apart from these
disadvantages of accident which have been overcome by men infinitely
inferior to Burke, it is easy to perceive, from the matter and texture
of the speeches that have become English classics, that the very
qualities which are excellences in literature were drawbacks to the
spoken discourses. A listener in Westminster Hall or the House of
Commons, unlike the reader by his fireside in the next century, is
always thinking of arguments and facts that bear directly on the
special issue before him. What he wishes to hear is some particularity
of event or inference which will either help him to make up his mind,
or will justify him if his mind is already made up. Burke never
neglected these particularities, and he never went so wide as to
fall for an instant into vagueness, but he went wide enough into the
generalities that lent force and light to his view, to weary men who
cared for nothing, and could not be expected to care for anything, but
the business actually in hand and the most expeditious way through it.
The contentiousness is not close enough and rapid enough to hold the
interest of a practical assembly, which, though it was a hundred times
less busy than the House of Commons to-day, seems to have been eager
in the inverse proportion of what it had to do, to get that little
quickly done.
Then we may doubt whether there is any instance of an orator throwing
his spell over a large audience, without frequent resort to the higher
forms of commonplace. Two of the greatest speeches of Burke's time are
supposed to have been Grattan's on Tithes and Fox's on the Westminster
Scrutiny, and these were evidently full of the splendid commonplaces
of the firstrate rhetorician. Burke's mind was not readily set to
these tunes. The emotion to which he commonly appealed was that
too rare one, the love of wisdom; and he combined his thoughts and
knowledge in propositions of wisdom so weighty and strong, that the
minds of ordinary hearers were not on the instant prepared for them.
It is true that Burke's speeches were not without effect of an
indirect kind, for there is good evidence that at the time when Lord
North's ministry was tottering, Burke had risen to a position of the
first eminence in Parliament. When Boswell said to him that people
would wonder how he could bring himself to take so much pains with his
speeches, knowing with certainty that not one vote would be gained by
them, Burke answered that it is very well worth while to take pains
to speak well in Parliament; for if a man speaks well, he gradually
establishes a certain reputation and consequence in the general
opinion; and though an Act that has been ably opposed becomes law, yet
in its progress it is softened and modified to meet objections whose
force has never been acknowledged directly. "Aye, sir," Johnson broke
in, "and there is a gratification of pride. Though we cannot outvote
them, we will out-argue them."
Out-arguing is not perhaps the right word for most of Burke's
performances. He is at heart thinking more of the subject itself than
of those on whom it was his apparent business to impress a particular
view of it. He surrenders himself wholly to the matter, and follows
up, though with a strong and close tread, all the excursions to which
it may give rise in an elastic intelligence--"motion," as De Quincey
says, "propagating motion, and life throwing off life." But then this
exuberant way of thinking, this willingness to let the subject lead,
is less apt in public discourse than it is in literature, and from
this comes the literary quality of Burke's speeches.
With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke owed much of
his own distinction to that generous richness and breadth of judgment
which had been ripened in him by literature and his practice in it.
Like some other men in our history, he showed that books are a better
preparation for statesmanship than early training in the subordinate
posts and among the permanent officials of a public department.
There is no copiousness of literary reference in his works, such
as over-abounded in civil and ecclesiastical publicists of the
seventeenth century. Nor can we truly say that there is much, though
there is certainly some, of that tact, which literature is alleged to
confer on those who approach it in a just spirit and with the true
gift. The influence of literature on Burke lay partly in the direction
of emancipation from the mechanical formulae of practical politics;
partly in the association which it engendered, in a powerful
understanding like his, between politics and the moral forces of the
world, and between political maxims and the old and great sentences of
morals; partly in drawing him, even when resting his case on prudence
and expediency, to appeal to the widest and highest sympathies;
partly, and more than all, in opening his thoughts to the many
conditions, possibilities, and "varieties of untried being" in human
character and situation, and so giving an incomparable flexibility to
his methods of political approach.
This flexibility is not to be found in his manner and composition.
That derives its immense power from other sources; from passion,
intensity, imagination, size, truth, cogency of logical reason. If any
one has imbued himself with that exacting love of delicacy, measure,
and taste in expression, which was until our own day a sacred
tradition of the French, then he will not like Burke. Those who insist
on charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and exquisite
suggestion, are disappointed in Burke; they even find him stiff and
over-coloured. And there are blemishes of this kind. His banter is
nearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said of it, and
very often unseasonable. We feel that Johnson must have been right in
declaring that though Burke was always in search of pleasantries, he
never made a good joke in his life. As is usual with a man who has not
true humour, Burke is also without true pathos. The thought of wrong
or misery moved him less to pity for the victim than to anger against
the cause. Then, there are some gratuitous and unredeemed vulgarities;
some images whose barbarity makes us shudder, of creeping ascarides
and inexpugnable tapeworms. But it is the mere foppery of literature
to suffer ourselves to be long detained by specks like these.
The varieties of Burke's literary or rhetorical method are very
striking. It is almost incredible that the superb imaginative
amplification of the description of Hyder Ali's descent upon the
Carnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned
_Address to the King_ (1777), where each sentence falls on the ear
with the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods. His
stride is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of the
picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the red horror of the
tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, positiveness, and cool
judicial mastery of the _Report on the Lords' Journals_ (1794), which
Philip Francis, no mean judge, declared on the whole to be the "most
eminent and extraordinary" of all his productions. Even in the coolest
and dryest of his pieces, there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, of
comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's style is noble, earnest,
deep-flowing, because his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and went
with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment. Fox told
Francis Horner that Dryden's prose was Burke's great favourite, and
that Burke imitated him more than any one else. We may well believe
that he was attracted by Dryden's ease, his copiousness, his gaiety,
his manliness of style, but there can hardly have been any conscious
attempt at imitation. Their topics were too different. Burke had
the style of his subjects, the amplitude, the weightiness, the
laboriousness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a
man dealing with imperial themes, the freedom of nations, the justice
of rulers, the fortunes of great societies, the sacredness of law.
Burke will always be read with delight and edification, because in
the midst of discussions on the local and the accidental, he scatters
apophthegms that take us into the regions of lasting wisdom. In
the midst of the torrent of his most strenuous and passionate
deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, and
in all tranquillity reminds us of some permanent relation of things,
some enduring truth of human life or society. We do not hear the
organ tones of Milton, for faith and freedom had other notes in the
seventeenth century. There is none of the complacent and wise-browed
sagacity of Bacon, for Burke's were days of eager personal strife
and party fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by the
cheerfulness, the polish, the fine manners of Bolingbroke, for Burke
had an anxious conscience, and was earnest and intent that the good
should triumph. And yet Burke is among the greatest of those who have
wrought marvels in the prose of our English tongue.
The influence of Burke on the publicists of the generation after the
Revolution was much less considerable than might have been expected.
In Germany, where there has been so much excellent writing about
_Staatswissenschaft_, with such poverty and darkness in the wisdom of
practical politics, there is a long list of writers who have drawn
their inspiration from Burke. In France, publicists of the sentimental
school, like Chateaubriand, and the politico-ecclesiastical school,
like De Maistre, fashioned a track of their own. In England Burke made
a deep mark on contemporary opinion during the last years of his life,
and then his influence underwent a certain eclipse. The official Whigs
considered him a renegade and a heresiarch, who had committed the
deadly sin of breaking up the party; and they never mentioned his
name without bitterness. To men like Godwin, the author of _Political
Justice_, Burke was as antichrist. Bentham and James Mill thought of
him as a declaimer who lived upon applause, and who, as one of them
says, was for protecting everything old, not because it was good
but because it existed. In one quarter only did he exert a profound
influence. His maxim that men might employ their sagacity in
discovering the latent wisdom which underlies general prejudices and
old institutions, instead of exploding them, inspired Coleridge, as
I have already said; and the Coleridgian school are Burke's direct
descendants, whenever they deal with the significance and the
relations of Church and State. But they connected these views so
closely with their views in metaphysics and theology, that the
association with Burke was effectually disguised.
The only English writer of that age whom we can name along with
Burke in the literature of enduring power, is Wordsworth, that great
representative in another and a higher field, and with many rare
elements added that were all his own of those harmonising and
conciliatory forces and ideas that make man's destiny easier to him,
through piety in its oldest and best sense; through reverence for
the past, for duty, for institutions. He was born in the year of the
_Present Discontents_ (1770), and when Burke wrote the _Reflections_,
Wordsworth was standing, with France "on the top of golden hours,"
listening with delight among the ruins of the Bastille, or on the
banks of the Loire, to "the homeless sound of joy that was in the
sky." When France lost faith and freedom, and Napoleon had built his
throne on their grave, he began to see those strong elements which for
Burke had all his life been the true and fast foundation of the
social world. Wide as is the difference between an oratorical and a
declamatory mind like Burke's, and the least oratorical of all poets,
yet under this difference of form and temper there is a striking
likeness in spirit. There was the same energetic feeling about moral
ideas, the same frame of counsel and prudence, the same love for the
slowness of time, the same slight account held of mere intellectual
knowledge, and even the same ruling sympathy with that side of the
character of Englishmen which Burke exulted in, as "_their awe
of kings and reverence for priests," "their sullen resistance
of innovation" "their unalterable perseverance in the wisdom of
prejudice_."
The conservative movement in England ran on for many years in the
ecclesiastical channel rather than among questions where Burke's
writings might have been brought to bear. On the political side
the most active minds, both in practice and theory, worked out the
principles of liberalism, and they did so on a plan and by methods
from which Burke's utilitarian liberalism and his historic
conservatism were equally remote. There are many signs around us that
this epoch is for the moment at an end. The historic method, fitting
in with certain dominant conceptions in the region of natural science,
is bringing men round to a way of looking at society for which Burke's
maxims are exactly suited; and it seems probable that he will be more
frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years
than he has been within the whole of the last eighty.
THE END
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